Balance in nature – review of the card game “Ecosystem”

Nasza Księgarnia publishing house has published a beautiful and small card game in which animals reign. Their appropriate number and arrangement will create lands and the best of them will ensure victory.

 

Good first impression

In a small box you will find a deck of cards, a pencil and a score pad. The graphics that were re-created for the Polish language version of the game are eye-catching and are definitely nicer than the original ones. I like them very much and I’m sure that they will catch the eye of many players looking for simpler, family titles.

It only takes a moment to prepare. Shuffle the deck, deal eleven cards to the players, and make the rest of the draw pile. Everyone also receives a reference card that explains the scoring rules. You can start the game.

Everyone chooses one card from their hand, places it in front of them, and passes the rest to the player on the left. Thus, they place ten of them in front of them, and the last one is kept for the second stage, where we get ten cards again and draw them again, but this time to the right.

After two deals, everyone should face a land made up of twenty cards. The only thing you need to remember is to arrange them on a 5 × 4 quadrilateral plan. Then we count the points and choose the winner.

Fast, nice and neat

Ecosystem is a card game that will take us a maximum of 20 minutes, because everyone is playing their turns at the same time. Even with a full team of six, we shouldn’t spend more time at the table. In addition, the box is small and the rules are very simple, so you can invite inexperienced players and children to the table.

As it happens in games with draft, we do not have full control over what comes our way and what we will have to choose. However, at the beginning, we have so many cards that a significant part of them will come back to us, so you can try to plan something. In addition, we see other lands, so we can guess in which direction their expansion will go and what cards their owners are waiting for.

Will advanced players be interested in such a simple card game? I think so, especially as a game that teaches draft and introduces planning in arranging a pattern, but also as a break between larger titles. The preparation consists of shuffling the deck and dealing cards, so with other titles that take a lot more time to set up, this suggestion seems very attractive.

My first association after the game was played was a simplified Cascadia  There, we place animal tokens on terrain tiles and we have to think about the best possible arrangement of two layers. In the Ecosystem , we create a rectangle of cards, which comes down to planning only one level, but the general assumption is similar – specific animals or elements of nature score for the neighborhood, number or lack of a given card in the environment. The difficulty level increases with each added card, because we have to stay within the limits, which does not always correspond to the optimal layout. This boosts the competition as the game ends.

The scoring is also fairly well suited to what the cards represent. The dragonfly scores points for the length of nearby streams, the bear for the trout and bees next to it, and the wolf for the largest pack in the land. And although the icons show their scoring conditions very well, and the help card dispels all doubts, neither will be needed for the second game, because we will intuitively combine animals and basic knowledge about them with the rules of the game.

The rule of ecosystem gaps is a good prevention of a small diversity of lands and a tactic of selecting a narrow pool of animals and filling their rectangle with them. For the absence of too many types of cards in front of us, we will get a penalty in the form of losing points. Therefore, balance is a goal that should guide us from the beginning of the game, because thanks to it we can count on victory.