Dominating

The local game Meetup has discovered Dominant Species, the hit GMT game that's gone into multiple printings.

We played the first game half wrong and still had a good time and our second game was a real eye-opener as the one person in the group who had not played in the first game ran away with a convincing win due to his near sweep of the end-of-game scoring round.

I'll have to play this quite a few more time before I can give anything resembling a  review, but the bottom line is that this is a fascinating game with a vast number of strategies available. I really felt like I was just scratching the surface of what the game had to offer. It's like some the best of the deep euros like Stone Age where every turn you are presented with about a dozen things you need to do and you can only do three or four of them.

The basic theme of the game is six competing animals vying for dominance in a hexagonal world that is slowly expanding and also slowly being overtaken by an ice age. Points are basically scored for having more "species" (blocks) on specific spaces during a scoring opportunity, but there are also various bonus scoring opportunities as well. Animals can compete directly and indirectly in many ways and there's therefore a lot of player interaction.

Given how enthusiastic the group was I expect this will hit the table a few more times over the summer.