by: Michael Barnes

Chad Jensen, one of GMT’s top designers, is best known for his generally excellent Combat Commander series of card-driven tactical games set in World War II. His new design, Dominant Species, reaches a little further back into history, arriving circa 90,000 BC. It’s a game of prehistoric survival among six different classes of animals struggling to establish their Darwinian superiority by adapting to the changing conditions of the earth as it approaches the Ice Age. With this title, Mr. Jensen has proven his mettle as an author capable of turning in an extremely accomplished design that feels like a hardcore Eurogame pumped full of thematic mechanics, survival-of-the-fittest-aggression, and intriguing complexity.

First, I’ll throw down the gauntlet of caveats.

This is not a simple or short game, and it is also one that occurs at a somewhat uneven level of abstraction. There are qualities that may be off-putting to both fans of heavier, less confrontational Eurogames as well as proponents of heavy conflict and strong narrative. There’s tons of cube-counting and the game is prone to analysis paralysis, but it also features extremely nasty cards that can seriously demoralize weaker-willed players. The rules aren’t particularly hard to grasp. In fact, I think it may be the best and clearest rulebook that GMT has ever produced. But aspects of gameplay and strategy are obscure even after a couple of plays so it does require some commitment and patience. It’s also a long game that could take as much as an hour per player. It’s typically longer than I’d like it to be, but with experience the playtime does come down. The production is decent but not great and its pale color palette and rudimentary artwork is a far cry from the kind of industry-best work like what Z-Man has been doing lately.

If you’re still on board for the remainder of the review- and you should be, because this is a very good game- what you’ll find is a game that has a lot more meat on its bones than many of its peers. Categorically, Dominant Species is a hybrid area control game utilizing a novel two-level majority mechanic paired with an action point/worker placement scheme driving gameplay. Printed on the board are twelve different actions along with spaces for players to place their limited number of action pawns. Other mechanics include matching up the “wants” of animals with the resources different terrain types provide, a neat system that predicts and cycles the availability and disappearance of resources, glaciations, and inter-species conflict so the arachnids can finally have their revenge on the insects.

The Earth of Dominant Species is comprised of modular hex tiles representing different types of terrain. At each vertex, a chip is placed representing one of six different kinds of resources the animals need to survive. Each type of animal has certain requirements- that change over the course of the game—that determine if species of that type are best adapted to the area. So if reptiles want sun, grubs, and water they’re best suited to terrain that offers all three. An animal’s dominance of a region is determined by how many elements they match, not by how many cubes present. Interestingly, each cube represents an entire species of that kind of animal. Talk about scale.