- •Bios Megafauna Living Rules
- •1.0 Introduction
- •1.1 Bios Series
- •1.2 Overview of Play
- •1.3 Game Scale (footer)
- •2.0 Components
- •2.1 Components List
- •2.3 Cards and Tiles with dna.
- •Dietary dna Codes.
- •2.4 Era Tiles (Immigrants & Biomes).
- •Immigrant Era Tiles have no climax numbers.
- •2.5 Map Tracks
- •3.6 Place your placeholder cards and animals.
- •3.7 Place your size animal, map animal, and homeland.
- •Start the four Period Decks and the Display. 13
- •3.9 Place the Atlantic Rift, Era, and Greenhouse Disks.
- •4.0 Sequence of play
- •4.2 Choose an action to perform.
- •4.3 Herbivore & carnivore contests, and final culling.
- •4.4 Scoring Rounds
- •5.0 Purchase a card
- •6.0 Resolve the event14
- •6.1 New Era Tiles event.
- •6.2 Catastrophe event.
- •6.3 Milankovich event.17
- •6.4 Erosion event.18
- •7.0 Play a card
- •7.2 Mutation Size Limits.
- •7.3 Adding Roadrunner dna.
- •7.4 Playing a Genotype Card (Speciation).
- •7.5 Playing a Genotype Card (Fossil Record).
- •8.0 Resize one of your species.
- •9.0 Acculturate one of your species.21
- •9.2 Benefits of Acculturation.
- •10.0 Expand an animal.
- •10.1 Choose Parent.
- •10.2 Choose Child Silhouette.
- •10.4 Choose Destination.
- •12.0 Rooter biomes
- •13.0 Herbivore contests
- •13.1 Biome Habitability.
- •13.2 Niche Contest.
- •13.3 Predator-Defense Contest.
- •13.4 Herbivore Dentition Contest.
- •13.5 Competition with Immigrants.
- •13.6 Losing a Contest.
- •14.0 Carnivore contests
- •14.1 Prey Suitability.
- •14.2 Physiology Contest.
- •14.3 Carnivore Dentition Contest.
- •14.4 Competition with Immigrants.
- •15.0 Greenhouse28
- •15.1 Greenhouse Habitat Displacement.
- •15.2 Empty Slots.
- •16.0 Extinctions
- •16.1 Extinction of Biomes or Immigrants.
- •16.2 Extinction of Player Species.
- •17.0 Episodes
- •17.1 Atlantic Rift.
- •18.0 Ending the game
- •18.1 Determining the Winner.
- •18.2 Flowing this game into an Origins Game.
- •19.0 Solitaire game
- •19.1 When Two-Tuskers Ruled the World (Solitaire).
- •20.0 Example of play
- •21.0 Tips on winning
- •21.1 Grab valuable dna
- •21.4 Predatory child.
- •21.5 Crossing the Atlantic.
- •22.0 Milieu
- •23.0 References
- •24.0 Credits
- •25.0 Player resources
- •25.0 Odds for a catastrophe not happening (courtesy Bill Su)
21.0 Tips on winning
21.1 Grab valuable dna
The goal is to play DNA from which you can establish four species with robust (but preferably short) genomes before each scoring round.
Amphibious Predators. Red and Orange, whose dentition favors predation, should buy P and useful roadrunner DNA. Perhaps the most valuable roadrunner is marine. Your first amphibian can be a seafood-eating “herbivore”. Then you are free to speciate an amphibian predator to eat your herbivores.
Dietary DNA. Perhaps the most valuable dietary DNA is BB in the Mesozoic, and G and H in the Cenozoic, followed by M and I. P DNA is valuable for predators, but less so for herbivores until the flowers, grasses, and deciduous trees start arriving later.
21.2 Size roadrunners.
If your opponent has more teeth than you and equally adapted for the biomes, your herbivores can survive by becoming “size roadrunners”: species too big or too small for the local predators to eat.
Tiny “Size-Roadrunners”. If the local predators are size 3+, then going to size one gives you the roadrunner advantage, as well as positioning you for expressing valuable husking, insect eating, and flight DNA. Watch out for the very limited range, however.
Big “Size-Roadrunners”. Large herbivores additionally dominate in “size” niches, and are able to migrate farther.
Predator’s Dilemma. Predators should avoid habitats with edible herbivores that are accessible to inedible herbivores. Otherwise the herbivore enjoying the roadrunner advantage could invade and drive you and your prey extinct.
21.3 Overspecialization.
Keep expanding your animals into new species to keep them from being overspecialized. For 5 card draws (50 million years), a species with a genome length of 4 DNA has about a one in ten chance of going extinct from a catastrophe. For a length of 7+, the odds increase to one in three. Such “comet bait” species may be useful as a sacrificial master race from which you spawn as many less-specialized derivatives as possible.
21.4 Predatory child.
A good time to create a new species is right after your first roadrunner. This new species can inherit the roadrunner and choose to be a carnivore on its parents.
21.5 Crossing the Atlantic.
Suppose you have a land animal that wants to expand into nearby sea biomes. Or worse, wants to reach biomes across the Atlantic, which requires MM to cross. Invading the water from land, and vice versa, is tricky because you must become an amphibian first.
The Migration of Frogs. The first step is to become an amphibian by playing a marine mutation. Remember that this cuts your migration range by one. In fact, if you are a size one amphibian, you may only migrate between the biome and triangles of the same habitat!
Learning to Swim. Because the rules do not allow you to migrate the same turn that you mutate, adding a second M DNA to a species living on land would kill it off before it could enter the water. The lesson: learn to swim in a pond before you attempt the Atlantic! In other words, expand your amphibian to a sea biome with no more than one M requirement. From here, you can safely adopt a second M card, so as to be able to cross the Atlantic.
Tail Fin. If you mutate with the caudal fin (MM) card, your species becomes a sea animal instantly. All its animals living on land would die that same turn. So obviously you must be living in a sea biome with at least one animal before trying to purchase this card. Note that after you play the caudal fin, you will have an MMM whale pod species!