North Star Games Oceans Board Game

Product Information

Finally, you age every species you have by transferring one fish token from each of your species into your score pile. In Oceans, fish is ultimately your scoring fodder. If your species have evolved and survived long enough to eat fish, they “age” on your turn. This means you can move a fish they have each been feeding on into your score pile. But if they can’t grow older, they go extinct! The odd production decisions extend to the box. For a game mostly consisting of tokens and cards it is absolutely huge, with a really odd insert. Now you might think that there is room in this insert for expansions. No doubt there will be some, but I bought the version with components for 5-6 players, with extra species boards, tokens, and screens. The tokens are fine but the screens and species boards just have nowhere to go. The rulebooks don’t even sit in the box flat. The production decisions are just baffling.

Take a free species board from the supply and place it so that the fish are facing away from you. A new species may be placed on either side of your existing species, or in between any two of your existing species. During the second half of the game, players can use power cards from The Deep to disrupt the stability. With over 100 unique traits in The Deep, players will slowly discover game-altering traits over the course of many games. These traits were designed to evoke wonder and disbelief - to spark your imagination as you consider the fantastic synergies that are possible in Oceans. You may never place a population token on the space with the fishbones unless it is the only available space on the species board. For the most part I really like Oceans. It’s blistering fast and easy to teach, has loads of replayability, and every game feels genuinely exciting, every species bizarre and unique. It's a game that invites you to create, to dive into its waters, and tell us what you have discovered. I thoroughly recommend it with the caveat that you will want to sleeve the cards and that I really feel the game is let down by some poor production decisions.

Behind Every Smile…

Oceans offers us a game of great depth. It is not the simplest game to teach and, appropriate for a game of this theme the direct aggression between players gives the game a lot of bite which many players might find too confrontational.

Oceans is a stand-alone game for 2 – 4 players in the highly acclaimed Evolution product line. Oceans depicts the interconnected ecosystem of marine life and combines it with the powerful mysteries of the unknown. At the end of each of your turns all your species age, losing some of their population. If a species doesn’t have enough population to lose then it goes extinct. The catch is that each turn you can only feed one of your species. Your species are constantly on the verge of starvation but you can only cater for one at a time. Small Original Seascape acrylic Painting on brod canvas, Abstract Blue Ocean Painting, Sea Landscape Art, Wall Decor Iain McAllister lives in Dalkeith, Scotland with his wife Cath and their two dogs, Maddie and Gypsy. He has been a keen member of the local gaming scene for many years setting up and participating in many of the clubs that are part of Edinburgh's vibrant gaming scene.It follows the HL playbook pretty well. One of the things I found funny at the time was how destructible everything is. It might have been a selling point, but when I see chunks of concrete missing... I’m an admirer of the Evolution series, interested in board games with depth and am part-seal myself so you’d think I would have dived straight into Oceans. It’s fun to explore new combinations and options, to slot traits together and see how they interact. The designers understand that “games are about feeling”: it feels pretty great when you figure out how to swim past the gaping mouths waiting for you on your next turn. The world is a wondrous place and Oceans, with its gorgeous Surface traits and beguiling Deep traits, lets you feel that wonder, evoking a sense of danger and exploration, risk and astonishment.