cashew | Evolution Board Game and Oceans Board Game

I just spent the last two days playing Evolution Board Game mobile app and Oceans Board Game mobile app basically nonstop.

Both are created by North Star Games and fairly accurately reflect the game mechanics of the physical board game. In fact, I'm so enamored with the app that I'm seriously considering buying the game to take it with me to play with my parents.

...But then I remember that my parents don't really have the patience to read tiny text on cards and so I decided, never mind. (._.)

Anyway, two quickie reviews:

Evolution Board Game

This is definitely the better made app of the two. For one, this one is actually complete. Second, this game is far, far more aware of the user experience. Let's get on with some of the basics!

UI
The UI in Evolution is really nice. Tap and hold to enlarge a card, drag to place the card of interest, and once you've finished your turn, hold the end turn button. The game zooms in on your hand and you can click on your opponents' (that's right, plural) names to check on their deck and see what they've laid out on the table. Different colored translucent arrows and highlight borders help remind you what you can and can't do. When you try to make an illegal move, the game will pop up a message telling you why the move is illegal. These things all come together to make it feel like you're putting down virtual cards and at the same time makes it easy to see the cards on a small screen. Nonetheless, I would recommend playing these games on a tablet rather than the phone, as the phone feels like it would be way, way too small.

Mechanics
As great as the aesthetics are, it's not very meaningful if you don't have good mechanics and this game has great mechanics.

You start off with a generic species and five trait cards.

Phase one, choose a trait card which has a corresponding food number and place it into the pool of available food.
Phase two, once everyone has secretly placed food in, it's time to add trait cards to your species. Here, you can either add cards to population or body size pool. Or you can add the trait directly to the species to evolve it. Each species can sport three traits at any one point.
Phase three, when everyone has finished allocating trait cards, it's time to feed.

Repeat these steps for 8 turns. At the end of the 8 turns, you get points for total traits on all surviving species, total population of all surviving species, and total food consumed.

General strategy is to go herbivorous when there's plenty of plant food and carnivorous when there isn't enough. Scavenging trait can be very helpful to survive off of the lean times and can leech off carnivores to support your herbivores in the meanwhile.

Add-ons
The tutorial helps you learn the basics of how turns and phases proceed. The campaign teaches you how to work some basic strategies. If you pay, you can invite friends to join your table and unlock harder AI and more challenging campaign stages, along with hosting your own game online and playing locally in 4-player mode, using the tablet as the game board. Playing against AI opponents (you get three styles of AI with the free version) allows you to unlock species art based on what species you've created while playing. You can also rank up by winning a lot and gain more avatars. There's also a leader board and achievement unlocks.

In short, there's a lot of added content.

Conclusion
The game is extremely fun, very versatile and can function as a replacement for the actual board game. Even the free version has endless replay potential. I forwent sleep trying to unlock as many species as I could. Definitely should have slept more, but the game is just so, so addicting.

Oceans Board Game

This is a stand alone game, despite similarities in theme. It's newer and not quite finished. The game is still being developed, but so far it's quite fun, if a bit lacking compared to its Evolution counterpart.

UI
This is the biggest problem with the game. It's like the game developers forgot they were developing for mobile. Even on my 1080i screen, the text were very, very tiny and required squinting to fully read. Furthermore, the trait cards shrink down to tiny little icons that are exceedingly similar and difficult to remember. While you can tap-hold to see each trait, this makes it necessary to keep tapping to check on your opponent's layout and can be a bit of an eyestrain. The game doesn't ask if your done with your turn, so you will only know you've made a decision you can't reverse when the undo button suddenly disappears. Also, if you try to perform an illegal move, the game doesn't helpfully remind you what is causing the thing you thought should work to fail.

Mechanics
This game is clearly developed to be a two-person game that can be expanded up to four. But the ideal number is two and that's the number of players in the mobile app version.

The game is executed in discrete turns.

During your turn, you must play one trait card, either creating a new species or adding to an existing species. Or you can use the trait card to move food from one of the three deep ocean pools into the reef, where you can feed. When you've finished, you must choose one species to feed and grow. At the end of the turn, all species that have population > 0 will add 1 point to your stack and decreasing the species' population by 1. Any species that does not have enough population will die.
Once your turn finished, you will get to choose to either draw a deep card or skip the draw. If you choose to draw, then you must draw, with no choice to skip. Then you can discard as many regular cards as you want and your hand is replenished up to 6 from the regular deck.
There are three deep ocean pools. Once the deep ocean pool #1 is depleted (and only #1) you trigger the Cambrian Explosion. Under the Cambrian Explosion, you can play two traits per turn and at the end of the turn, your species will add 2 points to your stack and decrease the species' population by 2. You can also play special "Deep" cards, which are unique traits and are powerful, but costs points from your point pool to play.
Once the deep ocean pool #3 has been depleted (and only #3), you will enter the last turn. Once the last turn has been finished, any additional population you have left on the surviving species are added to your final point tally.

Because you can only play one trait card at a time (or two during Cambrian explosion), there are lots of different strategies that you can develop, which reflects the vastness of ocean ecology. There's the parasitic life style, giant mammalian filter feeding, being an apex hunter relying on other fish species to fish up the food from the deep.

Unlike in Evolution, where you can build big solitary species or many cooperative species, here you must build species that mutually feed off one another as much as possible. Building up a good chain reaction is the only way to win consistently. As such, I personally found the game mechanics more strategically satisfying.

Add-ons
The game's tutorial runs you through one game from beginning to end, using a single strategy. Only by playing more against the AI do you find different strategies and synergies between the traits. Other than an in-game feedback system, there isn't really much of anything else other than the game and the AI. It's clearly still in beta stage and hopefully we'll see some kind of campaign/challenge mode in the future.

Conclusion
A game with complex and deep mechanics that is strategically satisfying. But the UI problems and lack of add-ons does mean it's relying solely on its mechanics to keep you engaged. It clearly succeeded with me as I spent nearly 24-hours straight trying to learn all the different strategies and tested them against the AI. My only complaint is that there isn't an endless mode where you just keep building on your strategy forever. Also, the text is too tiny. *squints eyes*

So there you have it. Two games that are free and quite fun. Go check them out!