Extinction

[psocoptera]

Extinction: The Game of Ecology is a 1970 territory-expansion game that my parents hadn't played since some time in the 70s. It was designed as an elimination game but gave a timed-game option; we played a very fast game of two turns each just to get a feel for it, taking something like 45 minutes to do rules, set-up, and play. Everyone has some different attributes, and player actions are determined by a spinner (the highlight of the game was probably the moment when I got out the spinner and my serious-gamer BIL made a deeply unimpressed face). In my opinion the biggest design flaw was that there wasn't a good way to keep track of which counters in which territories had already been dealt with; the game used dice pips to represent 1-6 individuals, but you obviously can't flip a die that you've moved the way you can flip a stack of cardboard unit markers. (You could use some other set of markers like pennies, but the game as boxed doesn't have anything.) There were also some occasional moments of "count all those pips, multiply by this other number, divide by ten and round to the nearest whole number" that felt like a dubious math-to-fun ratio to many of us. I thought it was fun to play not-very-seriously for a couple of turns, but would probably be pretty frustrating to be trying to play seriously for longer, as one might keep spinning the spinner and never get the good actions, while other people might get them repeatedly.

In other game news we've played a couple more games of Hare & Tortoise, which people continue to enjoy. (Q finally won Clue last week so we did finally stop playing daily Clue.)