Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I’m going to hop into this review and almost completely agree with Andrew’s review of Nature. I don’t have that much to add to his assessment. I’ve played Evolution, Oceans, and now this, and I like what this series does mechanically, I think it provides a sharp, competitive experience that scales well with player count, and offers the possibility of drama without requiring players to understand a billion card interactions to jump in and start kicking each other in the teeth.
I’ll cover what the upcoming Climate module adds to the experience, and then I’ll play around in my ivory tower and conclude with some thoughts about edutainment products. I’m going to assume you have a sense of how the game works.
Get cooked (or frozen)
The Climate module for Nature adds variability to the amount of food that appears each round. Because of the game’s modeling of timescale, it’s doing big chunks of time between each round, so you have some pairing of the setting of the game with a mechanism. When the climate tracker moves toward an ice age or a scorching age, there will be less food available for everyone to compete over, and there is a new survival mechanism that every player will need to contend with.
After everyone has fed, you’ll compare each of your species with a number of suns or snowflakes on the climate board. Large size species do better in the cold, small species do well in the heat. But, you’ll often need additional protection, because each sun or snowflake you don’t account for kills one of your population. Species can have four traits with this module, so you’ll be able to build out your tableaux for each species a bit broader to contend with this new obstacle.
Life is hard as an animal in Nature: Climate. Now, you have to not only worry about getting eaten by other players, you have to keep from getting frozen to death. This adds to the fun, because you have to make harder choices. Overall, the module increases the difficulty of play for everyone, and I love that. You play for an additional round as well.
I like Nature with only 1 module at a time, but if you’re more excitable, you can add multiple, so I won’t speak to that experience. It mostly makes the game more swingy and random in my experience.
Ok, yeah, so it’s a fun game, if you like cutthroat card battling. Now, I’m going to gripe a little bit.
What is going on with how this game thinks about evolution?
Edutainment is a fraught category. It’s hard to make things that are both fun to play and educational. Because this is difficult, I find that many publishers do a little sleight of hand and really double down on flavor text. Wingspan doesn’t really give much insight into the world of birds through mechanical means–instead it gives you the details written out on the cards. I’m fine with all that; I get that it’s tough to do.
Nature, and its predecessors Oceans and Evolution, are games that are enjoyable to play, but I quibble with how they are mechanically exploring the theory of evolution. To me, this series of games far more resembles a video game like Spore than it has any sensical representation of how speciation occurs.
Take, as an example, how antibiotic-resistant bacteria evolve. The bacteria don’t get together, hold a bacteria town council and say, “hey, we should do something about these antibiotics.” Antibiotics do things like destroy their cell walls or prevent them from synthesizing proteins. Through mutation errors, you occasionally get a bacterium that is capable of resisting a particular type of antibiotic. This bacterium then gets to reproduce, and suddenly you’re getting a sizable population of resistant bacteria. Environmental pressure (murderous antibiotics) drives selection.
What Nature presents is more, honestly, an image of intelligent design, where there’s some spiritual force (the player) guiding the development of species to, y’know, get points.
I don’t say this to put Northstar Games on blast or anything; moreover, it is an observation and bit of criticism about the possibility of creating games that model what they’re stating they’re modeling. Mechanisms are not turning gears; they are nodes of meaning that players string together in the architecture of “game.” The climate module, funnily enough, models climate change from a ground level perspective well (oh no, the earth is heating up, time for all my arctic critters to die), but it still presents this view of evolution as an elective process.
But, if you don’t care about any of that, it’s a hoot.
