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Had the gang over for gaming on Sunday. With five people in the house, we went for Dominant Species, with our usual random selection of animals leaving out the Birds (I think we’ve had them selected once).

I ended up the Amphibians (I think that’s a first for me), and accomplished nothing I wanted to do on the first turn. Three water did allow for some good dominance, but I didn’t end where I wanted, and lost most everything I gained. And I scored well, putting myself into a nice early lead.

Most of my attention got taken by Dave (Insects), who, like me in my last game (as the Insects) struggled with a grass-water capacity that lead into parity with my water-grass adaptation. In the mid-game we actually hit true parity (me 3/2 water/grass while he was 2/3), which lead to a lot of tied Dominances, and we were pretty well intertwined in oceans and wetlands as he separated from the pack to gain a strong second behind me.

I was going to try to keep Dave from getting (alone) an extra action by scoring his only Dominance for him (I had none at that point), but it turns out that he’d get the card at that point anyway. We’ve had that right in the past, but I keep forgetting it. On the other hand, we discovered a rule we’ve done wrong all along. A Regression action just keeps that player from regressing, we thought that it removed an element from the box so that regression wouldn’t happen.

In the meantime, Patch’s Mammals ended up struggling as most of the meat sources died out on a wasteland action. I never got a good sense of what Jason (Reptiles) and Mark (Arachnids) were up to for much of the game.

My consistent lead and good scoring drew a lot less fire than I was expecting for most of the game, though I did take some hits near the end. I then had an excellent turn, where things went right, and my new adaptation gave me a round of new Dominances across the board.

It was a real pity that was the second to last turn.

Instead, I got hit by Niche Biomes (by second-place Dave) for 9 VP, which put me a lot closer to everyone else. Mark suddenly turned into the Dominance machine as we went through the final turn, and there wasn’t a lot any of us could do as he picked up a end-of-game 8 Bonus Points, and second place.

Dave got some good scoring, and decent Dominance to win at 111 VP. Mark got 95, squeezing past my 94. Jason got 89, with Patch taking up the rear at 59 VP after never recovering from the mid-game collapse.

End of game.

A couple unusual notes for us is that we only had one glaciation action in the beginning game, though it got more popular later on. (This while it was raining outside, in the first of what we might hope is several storms over winter). And no one really came close to running through their species stock (and Hibenation came up early when nearly no one had any eliminated species to bring back).