Oceans Board Game

Oceans is a rather unique card game that is easily one of my favorites. It’s not a deck builder, it’s a creature builder. The rules are simple, yet the strategies for survival can be quite complex. While there is some minor element of randomness and luck (it is a card game) skill and planning will be far more important as you can always just discard the cards you don’t need until you get something you do. The artwork on the cards is beautiful and colorful. The theme of the game ties well into the game play itself. And it’s just plain satisfying to create your own little ecosystem of interconnected species all benefiting from each other. If you enjoy interesting and unique card games, or find topics like evolution and marine biology interesting, give this game a try. Seriously.

Oceans shot right up to one of my favorite board games immediately upon release. I had backed the game on Kickstarter, and had been looking forward to the video game that was advertised in the box. Took longer than was advertised, so long I forgot to keep checking and missed it for a while, but that’s to be expected with small studios and was not that big a deal. As an adaptation it recreates the gameplay of the table very swimmingly, not a complete Deep deck, again not too big an issue with how long it takes to program a hundred unique cards into a game, but what knocks a star off is that the game is limited to two of players. When you have four it really feels like you have an actual ecosystem to compete in, with lots of species to interact with. One on one is still absolutely worth playing and a blast, but without at least the option for four players this just feels like it’s not the full Evolution series experience. If the Devs ever add 3+player options (I have the bonus options for my tabletop that allows up to six players! That’s a little past what I’m asking but would be so cool) I would immediately bump this up to a five star rating. Still going to enjoy it till then.

I like the game, I find it a well woven web both enjoyably complex while being smooth and easy play. The mechanics used in the app work well, though there definitely could be an improvement in the explanation of the rules. The developers have made a few choices when writing the app for the various vagaries of play which are not explained or noted in the fairly short rules. At that point I would have rated it a 5 Star happily. But as I was enjoying it I purchased the expansion, for the very reasonable price of a dollar. This gives you a few more cards for greater replay ability, but mostly a level higher AI to play. As the base AI’s are easy enough that you’d have to try to loose after you understand the basic gameplay. The Medium AI however is really unstable. As in at least half the time I try to play the game crashes, generally repeatedly. So it’s the main draw to buy the upgrade, but doesn’t work half the time! And I have a fairly new iPhone, so it shouldn’t be a hardware issue. That’s why I had to downgrade my rating. I hope the app team can get the app working better, and that the company as a whole can continue creating good games like this. So in essence, get this app and try the game. But if you like it go get the physical game instead of trying to play it more on the app by upgrading.