14 DAY TRIAL // My go-to plan is to always create some big beasts and then take all opponents out by freezing them to death. It does require good card draws and careful play but tends to build a lead that competitors cannot bridge. Just make sure you get some extra food early on and, ideally, a way to store it. Then play feeding cards that drop the temperature and hope for a random event that pushes the climate at close as possible to Ice Age. Keep getting fat and protected while other players see their own species go extinct.
Evolution: Climate was developed and published by North Star Games, the same company that developed and launched the real-world board game on which it is based. I played the game on the PC using Steam but it is also offered on Android and Apple mobile devices and on the Nintendo Switch.
The core mechanics of Evolution are centered on food and the move from herbivores to carnivores. The player uses cards to improve his species, increase body size, create new creatures, and put plant food into the communal pile and eat it. The game is compelling as a competition between plant-eaters but, inevitably, evolution will lead to a carnivore. This adds complexity and threat to the game.
Climate adds a wrench into the classic arms race between prey and predator by making temperatures matter a whole lot. Big, protected creatures do well when it’s very cold, packs of smaller ones work well in a heatwave. I described my favorite Ice Age-focused moves above. I also won games by creating carnivores with pack behaviors that can hang when it gets scorching.
Evolution: Climate does not move too far from the board game space when it comes to presentation. Every element of the game, from cards to the climate tracker, is designed to be easy to read and understand and replicates the look of the real-world product. There are some extra effects that cannot happen in reality but I don’t feel like they add much.
Conclusion
The computer-driven opponents in the game work well, although they do seem to ignore my aggressive moves towards the Ice Age sometimes. And that’s important because it is hard to find a public multiplayer game. Play Evolution: Climate with friends or focus on completing the single-player campaign matches and the challenges.
