Ecosystem: Coral Reef is a closed-circuit deck-passing game, by which players use the dwindling supply of available cards to build a 5 by 4 grid of marine life! Everyone will wind up with their own completed ecosystem, but the particulars will grow harder and harder to orchestrate, leading to some… very strange placement. Coral floating at the surface, anyone?
Instead of having each organism’s effects on the cards, each player gets a cheat sheet, which will lead to a lot of cross-referencing in the early stages of the game. Each life form has a different bonus, most of them points-based, many of them in relation to the organisms they share rows, columns, or adjacency with. A couple of them have actions, like the octopus, who lets you move another card! Very important, as once cards are placed you can’t move them anymore. And sometimes you thought you knew what you were doing, and then your neighbor handed you a shark. Y’know, a normal problem.
Regardless, this one was a lot of fun, with point-stacking mechanics everywhere and an additional bonus for your least points-yielding type, be they producers, prey, or predators – which, being based off the point total of that variety and not merely the number of organisms, can be a hell of a bonus! This is definitely a ‘write down your math’ kind of game. And isn’t it gorgeous?
