Primordial Soup (board game)

Infobox_Game
subject_name=Primordial Soup
image_link=
image_caption=Close-up of a game in progress
designer=Doris Matthaus & Frank Nestel
players=3 to 4 (5-6 with extension)
ages=12 years and up
setup_time=approx. 10 minutes
playing_time=90+ minutes
complexity=Medium
strategy=High
random_chance=Medium
skills=Dice rolling, Bidding, Capture
bggid=124
footnotes =

Primordial Soup is a board game designed by Doris Matthaus & Frank Nestel and published by Z-Man Games. It was first published in 1997 in Germany by Doris & Frank under the name "Ursuppe" and this original version won 2nd prize in the 1998 Deutscher Spiele Preis.

Theme

Each player guides a species of primitive amoeba drifting through the primordial soup. The player controls whether and how his amoebas move, eat and procreate using the 10 biological points which he can receives each turn. A player may evolve his species by buying gene cards, which give the amoebas abilities such as faster movement. The abilities are pictured on the gene cards, showing amoebas growing fins, tentacles, spines, etc.

A key feature of the game is its self-balancing ecosystem. The food required by each amoeba is a mixture of the excrement of the other players' species. Food may become scarce and cause amoebas to starve, die and decompose into food. If one species becomes scarce, this will then cause problems for the other players, since their amoebas depend on all the other species to supply their food. Genes may mitigate this, for example by turning a species into a predator. However, this still requires some healthy prey to be available. Furthermore, the other players may react by turning their amoebas into predators themselves, growing spines for defense, or simply increase their procreation rate to offset the losses. The success of each strategy highly depends on the other players' actions as each species evolves to fill ecological niches.

Objective

Each turn each species scores points based upon its population and genes. The game ends when a player reaches 42 points or when the last environment card is drawn. This usually happens after 5-10 rounds so the game lasts 1-2 hours.

Equipment

* A game board with spaces representing the primordial soup, a scoring track, and a compass diagram.
* Two dice.
* 28 pegged discs representing amoebas, in four sets of different colors and shapes.
* 37 biological point tokens.
* 25 beads for marking damage.
* 55 foodstuff cubes in each color.
* 4 score markers.
* 33 gene cards.
* 11 environment cards which indicate the direction of drift and the thickness of the ozone layer.
* Game rules and reference sheets.

External links

* [http://doris-frank.de/Ursuppe.html "Ursuppe" Home Page]
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