Ecology has become a hot topic (literally so in many parts of the world) and the board game world seems to be reflecting that. In Ecosfera, from Julibert Games, 1-4 players are working to try to rewild the world by collecting plants and animals and finally activate seven different biomes before they are overwhelmed by disaster.
Ecosfera is essentially a deck-building game in which players start with one copy of the five basic elements. You use those to buy plant cards. Eventually, matching symbols on plant cards will allow animal cards to be obtained, and then at last the animals will enable the biomes to be activated. This three-tier deck-building feature makes the game distinct from others, as the elements, plants and animals can only be used with cards of the same type.
Julia Johansson and Albert Pinilla have designed Ecosfera as a cooperative game, so players have the ability to move cards from one person to another. This helps but it can still take a lot of patience to wait for the right cards to come along together. This is partly mitigated by being able to use cards on the turn you buy them, which is highly unusual for a deck-building game but definitely adds to the strategy here. However, on a big turn with lots of special abilities kicking in, it can get confusing trying to keep track of which cards have been used for their symbols, which have been used for their special ability, and which haven't been used at all and are thus eligible to be moved to someone else. We also found it surprisingly easy to get confused between plants and animals, but that may've been because we've been playing a preview prototype where the majority of the cards has temporary placeholder art (in our Board's Eye View we've shown only cards that display Albert Pinilla's finished art).
You can adjust the difficulty but this only determines how many element cards are available in each stack, which only affects the endgame. By contrast, in most cooperative games adjustments to the difficulty setting impacts players more noticeably throughout the game.
Although many turns will be straightforward with only one viable option, Ecosfera offers a good challenge and reasonable replayability. With no hidden information, it could be ideal for gaming families looking for a cooperative game without too much complexity, especially if they don't mind chasing down the elusive all-important bumble bee for the win...
The jury may be out on whether or not it's too late to save the world but tho' the Kickstarter campaign for Ecosfera has finished, it's not too late to nab a copy. Click here to Late Pledge.
(Review by Matt Young)