​THE GAMES
​Bios: Genesis
Playtime: 90-120 minutes
Teach time: 90 minutes
Game difficulty: Heavy
Number of players: 1-4
Timespan: 4.6 billion years ago to 541 million years ago
Key educational concepts: early geology & geologic events, key biological innovations that promoted unicellular success, micro- and macro-organism evolution
Favorite rules video: bits of board - watch it played
Rulebook: link
Associated curriculum and materials: paper: ‘What really is Evolution?’, paper: “On the causes of mass extinctions”
Additional gameplay materials (both highly recommended): Player Aid (created by SaburoChaos), Reference (by Nathan Morse)
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Update 2021:
In recent months, a lot has come to light regarding the personal beliefs and extreme views of the primary game designer, Phil Eklund. Most notable are his positive views of colonialism, HIS minimization of the holocaust and racial basis of slavery, and outright denials of the COVID19 pandemic and anthropogenic climate change. All of these false statements are mascaraed as facts, many times directly in his board games, and portrayed as the consensus among historians and scientists. I encourage you to learn more--- a good way to start is by searching 'Phil Eklund footnotes' on your favorite search engine. The most relevant discussions have occurred this January and February on Board Game Geek, Twitter, Discord, and Reddit. In short, Phil uses his platform as a game designer to evangelize these horrible lies, often putting footnotes on these topics in his games' rulebooks. For example, in the game Pax Emancipation, Eklund calls Abraham Lincoln a “great dictator” who “perpetrated widespread unconstitutional acts” and imprisoned “virtually everybody who disagreed with his radical views.” In another footnote he declares that “skin color is not in this game because it has nought to do with slavery”, and that only a “historical accident” led Europeans to enslave Africans.
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After learning the extent of this issue, I now refuse to encourage Eklund's actions, either by ignoring it or rewarding it financially. I have decided to l leave my reviews of his games online, in part, to point people to this issue. Until recently, I had no clue to the extent of Eklund's reckless behaviors. However, I also feel you should decide your response and course of action. I personally will no longer champion any of these games in any manner (e.g., three of Eklund's games were previously selected as 'Darwin's choice' – these have been revoked). In regards to how these bigger issues apply to this particular game, aside from his comments on climate change, the core ideas behind the gameplay are tightly aligned with the scientific consensus.
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Overview
Bios: Genesis is an incredibly ambitious game that spans the first 4 billion years of Earth and ends at the dawn of the Phanerozoic Eon (the eon of visible life forms, ca. 541 million years ago). The game begins just after the formation of Earth, where players attempt the long and stochastic journey to conceive single-celled lifeforms from Earth’s cosmic soup. During the early game (Hadean Eon), players focus on assembling the building blocks of life (amino acids, pigments, lipids, and nucleic acids). Eventually, by skillful mitigation of dice roles and careful investment in Earth’s refugia, players will achieve the first single-celled organism, marking the start of the Archean Eon. Players continue to evolve a modest single-celled species by adding new mutations that improve metabolism, add endosymbionts, increase DNA/RNA repair, and aid in oxygen tolerance (to name a few). Eventually, after accumulating enough mutations, multi-cellular life evolves. Play continues throughout the Proterozoic Eon until the evolution of terrestrial macro-organisms is achieved, culminating with mosses, snails, fungi, velvet worms, amphibians, and insects. At the dawn of the Phanerozoic Eon, the game ends, and the player with the most organisms of the highest complexity wins.
Learning and teaching the game
The game’s rich attention to scientific details that are carefully integrated into the mechanics makes this an absolute masterpiece of game design. However, they also directly contribute to its biggest downside, as these factors make this game incredibly dense and difficult to learn, resulting in an extended playtime. Lastly, to adequately comprehend the full brilliance of this game and make it worth the substantial learning investment, the game really should be played several times. Given these factors, I am hesitant to broadly recommend this game for educational purposes. However, I could easily structure a small graduate-level or upper-level undergraduate evolution course around playing all three games in the BIOS series: Genesis, Megafauna, and Origins. If I were to attempt to teach this game in the classroom, I would suggest it be done over three separate class periods that cover: 1) game overview: events, refugia and how to generate catalysts during the Hadean Eon, 2) using catalysts to create unicellular life and to mutate it, and 3) parasites and evolving multicellular life.
Box cover (image credit: SMG)
Gameplay
The mechanisms that power the game are quite engaging. For example, the game recreates the stochastic nature of early Earth through event cards that are drawn each round to change Earth’s conditions, which can promote or inhibit early life. This is complemented by the use of dice, which are rolled to see what types of life precursors are generated. In execution, this can be a brutal process, as many of the event cards absolutely limit evolutionary progress. The die rolls can seem to be against you as well, however, bad luck can be mitigated by creating enzymes to promote the generation of pro-life building blocks. For me, this perfectly reinforces the long and random birth of multicellular life. A vast majority of Earth’s existence was lifeless or inhabited by a limited array of single-celled organisms. This first arc (pre-life) carries on just long enough to make its point --- that the origin was punctuated by a rare set of events--- but it does it in a manner that doesn’t detract from enjoying the gameplay.
Another of our favorites is the mutation cards that are purchased and added to your single-celled organism. I love how mutations build the complexity of your organism, eventually allowing it to evolve into a multicellular organism while providing immediate benefits that allow your species to better adapt to the prevalent climates and geological events.
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Education value
This game is an absolute educational gem and could be used to reinforce many key evolutionary concepts. This mostly stems from the fact that the core gameplay mechanisms are directly tied to actual geological events and key biological innovations. Further, all the organisms in the game were real species and represent key milestones in modern biodiversity. Bios: Genesis covers a broad array of topics that could be reinforced through its use in a classroom. It’s a tragedy that the mere thought of teaching this game to students causes me to break out in hives.
One important thing that I struggled deeply with, which I think everyone should be aware of before they purchase this game, is that Phil Eklund, the game designer and a former aerospace engineer, is a huge climate change denier and thinks the science behind it is a hoax. He discusses his viewpoints at great length in the rulebook. As one of those scientists studying climate change, there is no debate to be had. PERIOD. Ultimately, I chose to use this detail as a discussion point---- even very smart people can be woefully misguided. Unfortunately, this massive misstep also makes me very skeptical of every other scientific detail in his games. However, at the moment, this is his most egregious error by far and the core ideas behind the gameplay are spot on.
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Event Cards (image credit: SMG)
Unicellular life with one mutation (to right) (image credit: SMG)
Fun factor
The game is a rewarding mix of strategy and tactics that will leave you pondering your decisions for days. The long stochastic nature of early evolution is perfectly emulated, however, this also means the game is punishing, at times, and leave you bitter. Lastly, the complexity and the many situational rules make the game feel like a mix between simulation and a strategy board game. Because of this, the game is entertaining but doesn’t beg for immediate replay.
A few mutations available in Bios: Genesis (image credit: SMG)
