We originally featured Prehistories on Board's Eye View about a year ago. It's a hand management, polyomino tile placement game with a strong push-your-luck element. We enjoyed it immensely, both as a filler-length gamers' game and as a fairly easy-to-play family game with largely intuitive rules. Now publishers The Flying Games are back with an expansion...
Prehistories: Evolutions requires the base game to play. Open up the expansion box and you'll find four sealed envelopes. The idea is that you open up the envelopes one at a time to discover their contents. Each adds components and new rules tweaks that 'evolve' the base game. With its initially sealed envelopes, it has the look and superficial feel of a legacy game but this format means you're actually gradually adding several mini-expansions to the game so that when you've discovered all the envelope contents, you choose which combination of elements to include in subsequent plays.
As the envelopes start out sealed, we've avoided Spoilers, so we're not showing off any of the expansion contents and we won't ruin any surprises by commenting specifically about what's in any of the envelopes. What you see here in our Board's Eye View 360 are the four envelopes you'll find in the box; the other contents are taken from the base game. Suffice to say tho', the 'secret' contents reveal definitely adds to the thrill of this very welcome expansion. If you're playing Prehistories as a family game, the sealed envelopes function very effectively as a way of trickle feeding modifications and tweaks to the game so that family members who haven't yet evolved into seasoned gamers can take the changes on board.
Like Prehistories, Prehistories: Evolutions is distributed in the UK by Hachette Board Games.