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Needless to say, I was immediately pumped when I first heard word of Dominant Species: Marine, especially the fact that it had the promise of hitting the table more often since it plays much quicker than its big cousin. GMT Games was kind enough to send me a copy so that I could dive in to see how it plays.
Dominant Species: Marine is a worker-placement, area-majority game from the late, esteemed, Chad Jensen and GMT Games in which 2-4 players take on the role of one of four aquatic-based animal classes — reptiles, fishes, cephalopods, or crustaceans — competing to become the dominant species by having the most victory points at the end of the game. Victory points can be earned in a variety of ways, but most often from area-majority scoring of terrain tiles on the game board.
Speaking of the game board, Dominant Species: Marine comes with a large game board that manages to temporarily transform your tabletop into a beautiful blue seascape thanks to Chechu Nieto's tasteful and vibrant artwork. Besides being easy on the eyes, it's well-designed and very functional, too. It's one of those games where after I learned and played it once, I've barely needed to crack open the rulebook since most of what you need to know is on the game board and player boards.
On the left side of the game board are slots for a rotating selection of evolution cards that players can snag when taking the evolution action. Then there's the action display on the right side of the board that has "worker placement" spaces for all of the actions you take in the game.
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Set-up for a four-player game
The center of the game board is where you'll have your eyes glued for most of the game considering that most of the actions directly impact the state of the board. The board is initially set up with specific terrain and vent tiles that make up the "earth", which is the playing surface most of the game is focused on. As the game unfolds, players add new terrain and vent tiles to expand the earth and create more spaces where their species can thrive, and more importantly, score victory points.
Each player starts with three of their species (cubes) in the center coral reef tile, which also has one of each element type. Elements are what your species needs to thrive and survive. Each animal class starts with specific elements they need, but you can evolve your species and adapt them to new elements throughout the game.
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Reptiles animal display
As for trait cards, each player chooses one of three that are randomly dealt at the beginning of the game. The trait card special abilities are super cool and change up each animal's abilities from game to game, unlike the original Dominant Species, in which each animal had a static, default trait.
Dominant Species: Marine is played over a series of turns (in reverse food chain order) in which each player either places one of their available pawns on a "fossil" action space on the action display to immediately take the corresponding action or retrieves all of their pawns from the action display. Aside from occasional interruptions from events being triggered and resolved, play continues in this fashion, from turn to turn, until the game ends.
Each player starts the game with a number (based on player count) of basic pawns in their player color, and players also have the opportunity throughout the game to gain access to special pawns by taking the dominance action when they are "dominating" one of the six elements (algae, worms, plankton, sponges, gastropods, and sun) in the game.
Basic pawns that you start the game with may be placed only in an empty, non-special action space that is after all of your previously placed pawns — after, meaning in a section of the action display below all of your previously placed pawns, or in the same section as your bottommost pawn, but in a space to the right of it. Controlling special pawns not only gives you access to to more "workers"; it allows you to ignore the basic pawn placement restrictions. You can place special pawns in any empty space including juicy "special pawn-only" spaces...and if that wasn't enough to "wet" your appetite, you can also place special pawns in spaces occupied by your opponents' basic pawns by bumping them off.
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Food chain/
turn order track
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Action display in action
Now that you hopefully have an idea of how the game turns flow, allow me to highlight some of the actions you'll take on your aquatic quest to become the one-and-only dominant species. When taking actions in Dominant Species: Marine, your goal is to enhance your animal's survivability while simultaneously hindering your opponents and strategically positioning your species to score more victory points than your opponents. Considering most of the points you score are from area-majority scoring of terrain and vent tiles, it's pretty important to get your species cubes out on earth and make sure they are "thriving". Every single tile scores at the end of the game, plus there are lots of opportunities to score in-game points.
The Speciation action allows you to add species cubes from your gene pool on your player board onto terrain and vent tiles on the game board. The elements that are currently present in the speciation section of the action display dictate which spaces you can add your species onto. You choose any one element on earth that matches the element type associated with the action space where your pawn was placed, then you place new species cubes from your gene pool onto any number of adjacent tiles. The number of species cubes you can place depends on the terrain type. For example, you can place up to four new species on ocean tiles, but you can place only up to two species on coral reef, kelp, or seagrass tiles.
To move your species cubes around on the game board, you can take the Migration action, which lets you move a number of your species cubes from anywhere on earth to an adjacent tile. The number of species cubes you can move is based on the action space your pawn was placed on.
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The Abundance action allows you to select one of the available elements and place it on any open corner of a tile. If you have endangered species cubes on an earth tile, you could take this action to place an element that matches your species to make sure they are thriving. Like most of the action spaces with elements, the elements available for this action are randomly drawn from a sack during set-up and during reseed events, so you aren't guaranteed to have the elements you need.
Thankfully, the Adaptation action allows you to select one of the available elements and place it on an empty element space on your animal display, so your species can evolve to survive with more types of elements. This serves a similar purpose to the abundance action as it helps your species thrive more easily, but it can also help with having element dominance to gain access to special pawns.
Domination is the bottommost action that you can place a pawn on and rightfully so because it's very powerful, helping you gain access to the special pawns I've mentioned. When taking this action, choose exactly one of the six element types that your animal currently dominates and take control of the corresponding special pawn, which now gives you access to place the special pawn(s) you control on special pawn action spaces. In addition, you move that pawn's associated target marker up the VP track to the space that matches your domination value.
To determine your domination value, count the number of that element type that you have on your animal display and multiply that by the number of tiles on earth that contain at least one of your species cubes and at least one of that element. With this in mind, you can probably see how adding elements to your animal display via the adaptation action and getting more of your species out on more tiles can increase your dominance score. To dominate an element, you need to have a domination value only higher than the current target, not compared to other players, which differs from the original Dominant Species. Beware though, as your opponents can swoop in and take the domination action to dominate an element that you already did, and they would gain access to that particular special pawn, so ideally you'd go into the domination action with a score that'll be challenging for your opponents to beat.
The Wanderlust action allows you to select a new terrain tile from one of the three face-up wanderlust tile stacks and place it on the game board. As a bonus, you earn bonus points based on the number of adjacent tiles that are the same terrain type as the tile you're placing. Also, if there are any elements available in the wanderlust section of the action display, you can place one on any vacant corner of the newly placed tile. Then in food chain order, every player may move as many of their species currently adjacent to the newly-placed tile onto that tile.
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Wanderlust tile stacks
Perhaps placing normal terrain tiles doesn't float your boat and you want to stir things up and create a bigger splash to impact the state of the game board. In that case, let me introduce you to the Tectonics action, which allows you to convert a terrain tile to a vent tile.
Similar to the wanderlust action, you can gain bonus points by placing the new vent tile adjacent to other vent tiles, and in this case, you remove and temporarily set aside all species cubes from the chosen tile. Then, of the cubes set aside, you place only one belonging to each animal back on the new vent tile. The rest are returned to their owners, but then you can place one of your species from your gene pool or even better, one of your eliminated species on the new vent tile. Thus, by taking this action you can clear off a bunch of your opponent's species cubes, then you'll end your turn having a majority on the new vent tile.
Vent tiles score only 1 point for a single majority, and if I haven't mentioned it yet, ties are always broken in food chain order in Dominant Species: Marine. So why on earth would you want to invest energy in vent tiles? Well, first of all, as I mentioned above, you can do it to wipe out a chunk of your opponents' species cubes, but even better, you can go for a vent tile strategy and try to gain the survival card and score bonus points when survival events are triggered.
If you have the most species on vent tiles when a survival event is triggered, you score bonus points based on the total number of vent tiles that are occupied by your animal species. Bonus points score as follows (quantity/VPs): 1/1, 2/3, 3/6, 4/10, 5/15, 6+/21, so the vent tile strategy can be viable if you play your cubes right.
I mentioned earlier how the reseed event is triggered on a retrieval action when all cubes are on the right side of the food chain track, but I haven't mentioned how the extinction and survival actions are triggered, which leads me to the evolution action.
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For example, if we were scoring the kelp forest tile (shown at left), the cephalopods (orange) would score 7 points, the crustaceans (brown) would score 4 points, and the reptiles (purple) would score 2 points since they are higher in the food chain than the fishes and would break the tie.
Your evolution card options vary depending on the action space your pawn is on. If your pawn is on the 3rd/3 space, that means you can choose one of the evolution cards in card slot 3 or lower. The evolution cards are all interesting, and during set-up you remove 10 of 34 without looking at them, so you never know exactly which cards are in play or when they'll be revealed. Many give you opportunities to score points and change up the state of the game board, and some of them have effects that impact the game while revealed in a card slot on the board. While "Adaptability" is in play, for example, you can bump opposing special pawns, but when someone resolves it, they would swap an element on their animal with a different type of element on earth.
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Evolution card examples
After resolving an evolution card, the cards slide down to fill in the gap, then a new card is drawn from the deck. If the new card has an extinction or survival event icon, this would trigger the corresponding event.
There's also the Autotrophs and Depletion actions that can remove elements from earth, and the Regression action, which can protect you from having to remove elements from your animal display during reseed events. Then there's the Competition action, in which you choose a tile on earth that matches the corresponding terrain type and you eliminate 1-3 opposing species cubes. Since just about every action in Dominate Species: Marine is geared at maximizing player interaction, there are obviously some mean things that can go down, but I wouldn't expect anything less in a "survival of the fittest" board game.
As players take evolution actions and resolve evolution cards, eventually the "Asteroid" card will surface, and when someone plays it, they dictate which tiles and species are impacted by the asteroid. Then you continue taking turns until the next reseed event would have occurred, perform one final extinction event, followed by a final survival event, followed by endgame scoring. Each player earns victory points equal to the sum of the total spaces occupied by the target markers associated with their controlled special pawns. Then you score every tile on earth one last time. The player with the most victory points wins.
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The replay value seems great so far; every game has felt slightly different depending on how players interact with each other and the game board, in addition to the variety of evolution and trait cards. Some games had barely any vent tile activity, while others had a ton comparatively. It's also worth mentioning that the rulebook has quite a few variants to mix things up further, and also an alternative option for playing two-player games.
I really love the awesome player interaction and the tough decisions that stem from the pawn placement rules. It's almost like a rondel in which you often want to jump ahead to beat your opponents to a particular action space, but you don't want to sacrifice missing out on earlier actions and being inefficient with your pawn placement — or maybe you do jump ahead and just retrieve your pawns prematurely. There are tons of interesting choices, and they vary depending on how your opponents are playing, which is very engaging. Plus there's a whole 'nother brain twist that comes with the timing of when your opponents are going to retrieve their pawns and free up action spaces that you've had your mind on.
I appreciate how different Dominant Species: Marine feels from most other worker placement games. I also dig that it plays differently enough from Dominant: Species that, to me, it's worth keeping both in my collection. I have no doubt that I will likely get Dominant Species: Marine to the table way more often mainly because it plays quicker, but I'm a fan of both games.
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