Board Games: Evo

We had various schedule conflicts last week, so the board games group met tonight. We decided to play Evo, a fun game where you play a dinosaur species fighting for survival.

The game is played on an island map, and each player accumulates points to use to bid for genetic mutations, which in turn give your dinos an edge on survival. The mutations give your entire species various advantages: move faster, survive in heat, survive in cold, lay more eggs, fight better, and so forth.

This game favors defense, so I didn't attack and instead moved to my strategic advantage. I also spent as little as possible on buying mutations, bidding on heat/cold survival rather than attack enhancements.

Midway through the game, I had sucessfully fended off a half dozen attacks and was in second place, close to the leader (Jeff). Another player was essentially out of the game (Ken), and the fourth was far behind (Stephane), but closer on the map to the leader so they were fighting it out for territory. I had moved my dinos to spaces they would survive, but new births wouldn't - I had a large stable population that wasn't growing. At this point I knew the leader would have to attack me to try to pull further ahead, so I took a chance and fell behind in points to secure better fighting (and defense) capabilities.

I was a point or two behind, when basically Stephane and Jeff got sucked into a territory battle that wiped out most of their population. Since you get points every round on how many dinos you have on the board, I was able to pull away and coast in for a victory, my second in a row (counting last time's win at Starfarers of Catan)!

This may have been my last board games evening with the group; perhaps I can make one more in the middle of June. Over the years we've played some pretty good games, and I've wound up buying my own copies of several ones I liked. Plus, taken a chance and bought a few games based on reviews.