BIOS:MESOFAUNA

A board game of the evolution of life for 1 to 4 players.

Game designer: Phil Eklund & Jon Manker

The “Bios” means it is part of the Bios series of evolutionary games (The trilogy: Bios:Genesis, Bios:Megafauna, Bios:Origins). “Meso” means “Middle”, “Fauna” means “Animal”, and so “mesofauna” implies creatures that are bigger than the microscopic unicellular creatures featured in Bios:Genesis, yet smaller than the ones in Bios:Megafauna. 

Bios:Mesofauna 2nd edition starts where the predecessor game Bios:Genesis left off, with the invasion of the land about 450 million years ago and is an Alternate 2nd Game in the Bios Trilogy. Bios:Mesofauna starts and ends at the same time as Bios:Megafauna. It follows the same sort of Achterbahn environment, same climate change, same or similar creeples, same VP, same tiles, same card colors, same cratons and drift, same basic and Achterbahn games, same catastrophes, same greenhouse, cloudiness, and oxygen. Same terrestrial settings. All of these are production and development advantages. The setting is the same, only the animals are smaller. 

Starting as an arthropod, either an insect, arachnid, myriapod, or crustacean, from one to four players make a beachhead on one of the four drifting cratons in the Ordovician. From a founding archetype species, you will sire squawking, flapping, and paddling species, represented by different shaped figures. Shapes are important because, for instance, a flying shape can only be preyed upon by another flying shape. Disperse these creeples across the weedy, forested, swamp, and sea biomes of your craton, or even to raft to new cratons. Each shape is a species, and each species has its own tableau. Mutation cards and organ cubes in this tableau enable the creeples of that shape to win in contests with other herbivores or carnivores. At the end of each 5-turn era, you will be awarded fossil chits as Victory Points based on where you rank in terms of living creeple populations.

Your struggle for terrestrial dominance may eventually include mutualism, Pheromones, and eusocial, worth VPs at the game’s end. It is possible to combine Bios:Mesofauna with Bios:Megafauna components.