Rindis.com

Shortly after the last group day, I remembered Dominant Species, and proposed that for the next time, hoping we might get to try it with a larger number of players. Sadly, Mark and Patch could not make it, and Zjonni had to cancel at the last minute, just leaving me, Jason and Dave for a three-player game.

Random draws gave me the mammals, while Dave got the reptiles, and Jason the amphibians. I quickly started falling behind in the VPs over the first 2-3 turns, since I was more trying to maneuver for position, and was only hitting one scoring action per turn. It sure didn’t seem like I was getting anywhere though, and I was starting to think my entire plan had backfired. But I did manage a Wanderlust action with four adjacent hexes, and the Bonus VPs put me back in the pack.

During lunch, I finally remembered I have a camera available now, and started taking pictures:

After the end of Turn 3.

Jason had been pressing forward on glaciation, and getting a slowly increasing number of VPs as the bonus set for Survival started ratcheting up. Meanwhile, I had a fair chunk of the board to myself, which was nice, but not really helping at that point. I sacrificed an action for a turn to get the glaciation out of Jason’s hands and start trying to disrupt his area. I ended up tying on the tundra, putting the Survival card out of play for a turn.

While everyone had benefited from Intelligence (boosting us to 7 actions each), Dave grabbed Parasitism, giving him and Jason the eighth action tokens. I managed to complete the circle of tundra around the original center, cutting off all food sources, and allowing me to be the only survivor there (thanks the mammal’s power). That and some good Dominance card plays gave me a handy lead there, and my VPs broke into a solid lead thanks to the Bonus VPs.

The last turn was full of maneuvering for position. I had to take a regression (losing my second seed element), and lost dominance in a lot of areas (Dave and Jason also had extra elements of their base type; it was hard to win dominance when one water token gave the amphibians four points…). But I had completely won out in the tundra, and still did okay on the final Dominance Bonus scoring for a very convincing win.