Game Overview
90,000 B.C. — A great ice age is fast approaching. Another titanic struggle for global supremacy has unwittingly commenced between the varying animal species. Dominant Species is a game that abstractly recreates a tiny portion of ancient history: the ponderous encroachment of an ice age and what that entails for the living creatures trying to adapt to the slowly-changing earth.
Each player will assume the role of one of six major animal classes—mammal, reptile, bird, amphibian, arachnid, or insect. Each begins the game more or less in a state of natural balance in relation to one another. But that won’t last: It is indeed "survival of the fittest".
Through wily action pawn placement, players will strive to become dominant on as many different terrain tiles as possible in order to claim powerful card effects. Players will also want to propagate their individual species in order to earn victory points for their particular animal. Players will be aided in these endeavors via speciation, migration, and adaptation actions, among others.
All of this eventually leads to the end game—the final ascent of the ice age—where the player having accumulated the most victory points will have his animal crowned the Dominant Species.
But somebody better become dominant quickly, because it’s getting mighty cold...
Game Play
The large hexagonal tiles are used throughout the game to create an ever-expanding interpretation of earth as it might have appeared a thousand centuries ago. The smaller tundra tiles will be placed atop the larger tiles—converting them into tundra in the process—as the ice age encroaches.
The cylindrical action pawns (or "AP"s) drive the game. Each AP will allow a player to perform the various actions that can be taken, such as speciation, environmental change, migration, or glaciation. After being placed on the action display during the Planning Phase, an AP will trigger that particular action for the owning player during the Execution Phase.
Generally, players will be trying to enhance their own animal’s survivability while simultaneously trying to hinder that of their opponents’—hopefully collecting valuable victory points (or "VP"s) along the way. The various cards will aid in these efforts, giving players useful one-time abilities or an opportunity for recurring VP gains.
Throughout the game, species cubes will be added to, moved about in, and removed from the tiles in play (the "earth"). Element disks will be added to and removed from both animals and earth.
When the game ends, players will conduct a final scoring of each tile—after which the player controlling the animal with the highest VP total wins the game.
A "script" to be followed by the person explaining the game to new players. It aims to develop the group's understanding from first principles (theme of the game and what the goal is), through an explanation of components and game terminology (when first encountered, new game terms are Italicised), followed by the mechanics of the game.
The aim of this file is to enable a new player/host who is unfamiliar with the game - or at least, not familiar enough to feel confident in "winging it" - to impart all relevant information in the most efficient and precise manner possible.
Paper and dice artificial intelligence sparring partner for playing the 2 player game solitaire. See the thread "[thread=1326086][/thread]". Original posting is by [user=Elad]Elad[/user], he has happily adopted the refinements as discussed in the thread. This is a printer friendly PDF file made from the April 7 2015 posting.
The French version of my cards that have been available for a while in downloads. A big thank you to Michael Halimi who provided the actual translations for me and requesting a French version of my redesign. If there are any typo's blame him ;)
This file is a graphical Player Aid, in French, based on koergul's concept http://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/98377/ds-graphic-action-overview-version-10
i made these stickers to put on top of the action pawns to help make my game less "dry" visually. after all, it's a game about animals. i cut the stickers shorter than the actual top to let the wood show on the edge & the odd shape is easier to cut than a perfect circle. i printed these on a sheet of Avery 5163/3100-S 2 x 4" shipping labels. the actual stickers use 6 labels out of the 10 on the sheet.
Parte 3
Portuguese translation of the redesigned cards by Lanfearious (https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/82529/dominance-cards-redesign)
*Split into 3 parts
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Tradução para o português baseada no trabalho da Lanfearious (https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/82529/dominance-cards-redesign)
*Dividido em 3 partes
Para ser utilizado necessita todas as partes.
