Evolution: Another World solo rules
One book to rule them all: week May 15 - 21
Evolution: Another World is a game about creating fantastical creatures with all kinds of interesting abilities. In this iteration of Evolution the premise is less violent, more family friendly. How does it work?
Summed up
You play against an AI called Shade. It doesn't have a hand of cards, plays directly from the draw deck, but owns its own creatures that can hinder your progress. Its win condition is transmuting a single creature. You on the other hand have to transmute three creatures to win. You both start with 1 nondescript creature (it's a lizard, conveniently it's the back of trait cards) and you start with 5 cards in your hand. Shade is starting player. Once per round you can redraw (mulligan) your hand of cards. The main way to get energy is source card drawn at the beginning of the game.
Each round consists of a number of turns until all your creatures fall asleep. Turn consists of up to 3 actions (each only once):
create new creature (optional) - you put trait card from your hand face down on the table
add trait (optional) - each trait card has 2 traits available, choose one and put it on one of your creatures
activation (mandatory) - activate one of your creatures
Creature activation has 4 possible actions, you choose one:
gain energy - move one energy from source (if able) to your creature
attack - only possible if you have any attack traits on the creature, used to influence other creatures (gain energy, destroy trait card, put to sleep)
transmute - if the energy track is full on the creature, take transmute token and discard the creature and its traits
sleep - if you can't or don't want to do anything else, you put sleep token on your creature. Creature that's asleep can't be activated for the remainder of the round.
Round ends when all your creatures are sleeping. Then replace the source card, remove all sleep tokens, draw new cards and move first player marker.
Shade performs the same actions as you do, but there's always an "if then" rule. For example it creates new creature only when all of its creatures are sleeping. There's a deck of cards called decision cards, if you need to decide a target creature or trait to be removed due to attack actionst. Some traits also work a bit differently for Shade and some it doesn't use at all. General rule is it uses trait that is on the top of the card if able.
My thoughts are revealed
Rulebook
I didn’t come across any issues. Solo rules are a modification of 2p rules, so need to read both.
Overall
Maybe some of you are surprised by this choice, I was about to do a rules summary for disrupt, but they didn’t provide to this day the solo rules. So I decided to post Evolution, which I looked into also this week. I never looked into the original Evolution, but this one looked charming and I was always fan of evolving creatures. It’s a very simple game, the solo is based a bit on randomness, which is not a bad thing. What bothers me personally is the size, for such a small game, the cards are tarot sized, so bigger footprint. Sadly for me that’s a dealbreaker.
Evolution: Another World has launched on Kickstarter and the campaign will run for 15 more days. Both retail and special editions are available as well as sleeves add-on.