Category: Medium games

I first tried Evolution in November at a convention with Mom. I loved it. While Mom went to the art show and the dealer’s hall, I stayed and kept playing over and over again.

Recently, Evolution’s first expansion* came out. In the original, you have species cards with little cubes that say what the population and body size of that species are.

Each turn you play trait cards on your species. For instance, you could have a Horned species, which means that if a Carnivore tries to attack you it must lose one population. You have a maximum of three traits on each species. So, for instance, you could have a Climbing Horned Carnivore. After you play traits, you feed from the watering hole or food bank.

In the expansion, you can have flying species and several new traits. They also introduce event cards. So now you could have a Horned Avian (flying) species with Quills.

In addition to the watering hole, there is also the cliff. Avian (flying) species can take from both the cliff and the watering hole when feeding, but land species can only take from the watering hole. The expansion also adds length to the game because of the additional cards.

I would play this game with my convention friends and my parents.

Rating (original): 

Rating (expansion): 

* Our copy was purchased through Kickstarter.

“Cassandra and I first played DiXit a couple years ago when we went to a gaming store for International Tabletop day. Silly me… I thought we could stay for an hour or so after lunch and then head home. It was closer to three hours later when we left, having played a variation or two of Fluxx, DiXit, and an assortment of other games. The game quickly made it onto our game shelf, but somehow sat unplayed until recently….“ (Mom)

DiXit is an interesting way of describing pictures. On your turn, you play one card from your hand and give it a quick description. For instance, in the  picture shown at the bottom of the page, the clue was “Light.” After you make your description and play your card face down, everybody  else plays the card from their hand that they think best fits the description. You then shuffle all of the cards together and play them all face up.

Next comes the voting. Everybody takes their voting tiles and chooses the one with the number of the space where they think your card is. The numbers of the spaces are written on the side of the score board.

Finally, we score.^* You reveal which card was yours. The scoring is quite possibly the trickiest part of the game. If everyone found your card, than you don’t get any points. If nobody guessed your card, you still don’t get any points. You want some people to figure out which one was yours, but not all, or you will not gain any points for that round. The first person to reach 30 points wins.

I would play this game with my immediate family and convention friends.

Rating: 

* Well, everyone else does. If you look really closely at the picture, there are 3 little painted rabbits. I was the blue, way back on the 4.