Name: Dominant Species
Publisher: GMT Games
Year Published: 2010
Average Retail Price: $50 – $60
Good: Never the same game twice – Multiple winning strategies
Bad: Low production value – Randomness dominates strategy – Potential runaway leader problem – Poorly balanced – Does not play well with too many or too few players
Dominant Species is a new game that is best described as the spiritual successor to the little known game Ursuppe. While the game mechanics are radically different between the two games, the concept of constantly expanding while trying to maintain your food supply makes the two games feel similar. This is where the similarities end as Dominant Species is a much more complex game than Ursuppe.
At first glance, Dominant Species is not much to look at. The box art, while beautiful, uses slightly faded colors. This color fading continues when you open the box and look at the game board and pieces. The production value of Dominant Species is quite low and the board and cardboard chits look only slightly better than what could be produced on a low quality color printer.
Luckily for GMT Games, Dominant Species is a better game than it looks at first glance. What the game lacks in production value it makes up for in complex, yet well intertwined game mechanics. Each player takes the role of a different species of animal and your goal is for your species to control the most fertile territory throughout the game.
The complexity of the rules is such that trying to relate them succinctly is nearly impossible with any degree of clarity. The short version is that you expand your species, adapt your species, expand the world, and modify the food source of the land while avoiding ever present cataclysms and a growing ice sheet. If you can manage to adapt well and spread out intelligently, you will gain more points than your opponents and win the game.
These mechanics highlight the best parts of this game. Because there are so many subsystems in the game, each game plays differently than the last and a winning strategy in one game may be a losing strategy in another. This is highlighted by the fact that you randomly choose a species in each game and each species has a different advantage than the other species.
Unfortunately, the high point of the game also reveals the low point of the game. Unlike many modern games, the game is very poorly balanced. Some species simply have better species advantages than others and some advantages are better depending on the number of players in the game. In addition, the cataclysms that affect the game appear randomly and the order in which they appear significantly sway the outcome of the game. In fact, these random events basically dominate almost any strategy, making it more of a game of luck than skill.
In addition, the game suffers from a few other problems that are common to many board games. Despite officially being playable by 2-6 players, the game is quite unpleasant to play with either 2 or 6 players and has a major runaway leader problem with 3 players. In fact, the potential for a runaway leader exists in just about any size game, and little can be done to rein one in. Finally, the game permits both king making and bullying, both of which can make the game unpleasant to play for all players.
Despite the laundry list of problems, Dominant Species is not a terrible game. It simply hasn’t matured to the standards expected of modern board games. The randomness and game mechanics both make it one of the best examples of a worker placement game, a type of board game that has passed its prime in popularity. Old school gamers will probably love it while fans of modern board games will grow quickly tired of the poor game balance.
Rating: 3 (out of 5)
