Dominant Species

 Dominant Species

I've been wanting to play this game for so damn long, but everything I read online made it sound like it was a longer game that required some decent time commitment. I read the rulebook a couple of times and tried to grok the game by playing through some of it by myself to get a handle on the steps taken. By the time I was done, I felt as though I had a decent handle on it, but I could appreciate how the placement of Action Pawns might take *forever*. Not because it was complicated, but because it's not really Action Placement so much as Action Planning.

What does that mean? Well, in the former, players usually select their action and then take that action immediately. But that's not how it goes in this game. In Dominant Species, players spend an entire game basically announcing their actions before the phase in which those actions resolve in a prescribed order. Which means that I might place my AP (Action Pawn) on the Competition action so I can eliminate some opposing species from tiles that my own species cubes occupy. But after placing that AP, the opponent I planned on targeting places their own AP on the Speciation action, thus allowing them to place new Species cubes on a tile. In action order, Speciation comes before Competition, despite the fact that I placed my AP before my opponent placed theirs. The result? I had every intention of eliminating their species so I could get Domination over that tile. But now, before I get the chance to do that, my opponent reinforces their species cubes on that tile, so my elimination of their one species cube is basically irrelevant because I won't get what I want out of the action. I can still use it elsewhere if I want, but if that one thing dictated my other choices, that could really screw up my whole turn!

Chad stomped me. That's kind of par for the course when we play a new game. But I can't be too upset - I did the same to him when we tried out Now or Never. And I'll likely (Now or) Never let him forget it.

Anyway, all of that is to say that these notions kept me from playing the game until I "had adequate time" based on what I'd heard and read. But I tell you what: I waited far too long to try it. It really isn't as involved and long as people say! Don't mistake me - it could be! This is not a game to play with people who regularly suffer from analysis paralysis. There's a decent amount of chess here with regards to "If I move here, they'll move there, I can set the trap for them here, but they're also clearly baiting me there." So the analysis paralysis may yield fruit! Honestly, spending a ton of time thinking about your Action Programming may very well pay dividends! But holy hell, does that get boring for everyone else. There are definitely people with whom I'd never play this game. But Chad and I are very similar in that we'll think about our moves, but we try and do that thinking during other players' turns. And if we find ourselves getting stuck, we just make a decision and move on. If it's the move that loses us the game, then so be it. At some point, it's just time to move on and keep the game rolling. I also own Dominant Species Marine and we both want to get to it, but we agreed that we wanted to play the original first because we'd both heard that DS Marine is a sleeker design and an improvement on the original DS. That may well be the case (re: DS Marine), but honestly, I thought the design of the original was quite good!

Chad used the Insects and I chose the Reptiles. I got myself off to a good start by leveraging Glaciation to sabotage some of Chad's plans. That also allowed me to outpace him in the Domination action department for a couple of turns. But then Chad had a pretty monster turn, some of which stemmed from my own oversights. The main was a culmination of a couple of turns. So I actually had more than one chance to avoid the disaster, but my eyes were elsewhere.

It didn't cost me a hand, but it did cost me the game.

I hadn't really used the Abundance action because I was so focused on eliminating Chad's species cubes. Between Glaciation and a couple of Domination cards, I was able to thin the herd considerably. Having never played the game, it wasn't my strategy to basically eliminate Chad from the game. But I looked at his remaining cubes and thought I might be able to more or less get him off the board. I decided to keep my foot on the gas for that strategy and see if I could just force him to be so thin that he was effectively a speed bump. The result was that certain element discs moved from the Abundance box into the Wasteland box, and then into the Depletion box. The elements on which I was counting to keep my species Dominant on their tiles became laughably scarce and suddenly, my control of the board went from about 66% down to maybe 20%. It was devastating. And the funny thing is that I don't know at what point Chad saw that avenue to victory! He might have been planning it early and working to keep my eyes elsewhere or he may have just seen a window and ridden the wave to its conclusion, sparing very little effort to actualize my demise. It sucked for me, but it was kinda fun to watch it all fall apart the way it did!

Now my presence on the board was tenuous, Chad was up by one Action Pawn, he was up on points, and neither of us really saw a way back for me in the (probably) 2, maybe 3 turns we had remaining. Chad and I approach first plays in similar ways: we're playing to win, but we're more curious about how the game works than anything else. So we're more likely to commit hard to a strategy just to see what the consequences are. And as my friend Roger likes to say after a first play: "Okay, now I'm ready to play." That's how I felt in the wake of Dominant Species. This is surely one of those games that Chad will get even better at and continue kicking my ass. But I really want to get back to it because I think my play really will get better with each attempt because there's quite a lot of depth to the game and more to juggle than...okay, this will sound weird. But when I first read the rules, I thought there was a lot to juggle. But once I started playing, I thought there was less than I sort of anticipated because there's only so much a player can do in one turn. But after the game was over, I think there's even more to juggle than I initially thought when I was a little intimidated by the game's complexity! But even with that said, I don't think players should be intimidated by this. Yes, there's quite a lot of depth. But I know what I'm doing when I do it, even if I don't necessarily see the full impact of my choices. I'm looking forward to hitting this one again soon!