ECOSYSTEM

Balance your ecosystem and eleven different scoring requirements in a beautiful little card game full of nature and animals.

Each player is given a hand of ten cards. Players each select one card to play, adding it to their display before passing the remaining cards on to the player on their left. This continues until all ten cards in each hand have been played. You then do another round of drafting, except this time the cards are passed to the right. Each player has a four-by-five display of cards: this is their ecosystem. When adding a new card to your ecosystem, it must fit inside the grid and you must place each new card adjacent to another card.

There are eleven different types of cards, each of which has its own unique way of scoring at the end of the game. For example, eagles score points based on how many rabbit and trout cards are two spaces away from them, while trout score points based on adjacent streams and dragonflies. Rabbits are only worth a single point each, but when played allow you to swap the placement of any two cards in your ecosystem. Many of the scoring requirements combo off of each other in similar, clever ways that force you to consider card placement carefully.

After the second round, players count up their points. Players then lose or earn extra points based on the number of card types they have scoring in their ecosystems: the more types, the better. The player with the most points wins.