Base price: $15.
2 – 4 players.
Play time: 10 – 20 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 5
Full disclosure: A review copy of Symbiosis was provided by Hachette Boardgames / Subverti.
Okay, as my allergies have informed me, it’s officially spring, and that means that it’s time to cover some nice games and also to invest in Zyrtec. It’s wild how I used to just shut down completely for a week and not do anything useful when I could have just been taking antihistamines and passing out for just one full calendar day. How lovely. This particular game takes all the seasons into account, which is always nice, but I figure any game that focuses on life and animals is a great way to kick things off. Yes, I know we’re already well into April, but I was focused on Greek Mythology last month. Let me have this.
In Symbiosis, your goal is harmony in your pond. Life that interleaves and works well together, based on the animals and the seasons. To help things along, you can take from and donate to the River, getting various animals with preferences and occasionally some cool mollusks. Your opponents seek similar levels of harmony, Maybe even more harmony? A more overall harmonious outcome? That just won’t do. So you’ll have to out-harmony your rivals with beautiful animals and a smart understanding of the seasons if you want to achieve a perfect symbiosis. Do you have what it takes to form an even more perfect union?
Contents
Setup
Not much on this one. Everyone gets eight cards face-down to form a two row, four column pond:
Four cards go face-up to form the River. You can set the score sheet aside, for now.
Each player then reveals one card in their pond at the same time and you’re all good to start!
Gameplay
Not too tricky, here. In the core game, each turn you’re going to choose a card from the River and swap it for a card in your Pond. When you do, your Pond card goes back to the River and gets flipped face-up. That’s really … almost all of it?
The fun part comes in with scoring. When you score, you look to the players on your left and right. The cards in your Pond have either absolute scores (8 or 5 or something) or relative scores (4 per orange card). Any relative-scoring cards in the leftmost or rightmost column of your pond score based on the ponds of the player to your left and right (respectively). The four cards in the center of your pond score based on your pond. Tally those up and the player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
I actually kind of love this at two players? With the Duel Mode, I mean. You play normally, normally, but for Duel Mode, your game shifts a bit. Instead of having a four-card river and playing against your opponent, you have an 8-card pond that sits between you. So you’ll have the pond on your left or right and your opponent on the other side. This means that now, that pond counts as a player! So your left or rightmost cards use that pond for scoring purposes, but you’re still swapping cards in and out of it each turn. Very exciting. I think that makes for a very interesting scoring opportunity, rather than just relying on another player to keep things interesting, and I like that it makes the two-player game viable and neat. I’ve probably played it ten times by now? I haven’t been keeping as rigorous of a count as I used to; turns out some people find that annoying. I get it. At four, you can also play a team mode where you play normally, but your left and right columns of cards now score your partner’s pond, not your opponents’. You total your score and the team with more points wins! Both are very neat ways to expand on a simple, fun game, so mix it up and see what you like best! I’m a big fan of the Duel Mode though.
Strategy
- Stay flexible. You’re going to be moving cards in and out of your pond the whole game. This is much more a tactical game than a strategic one, as a result. Don’t get too attached to any particular card or strategy until probably the middle of the game, where you’re fairly locked in. You may end up swapping things around based on what your neighbors are doing.
- Honestly, 8-point cards are often just worth keeping on their own. You’d probably do pretty well with 64 points (eight 8-point cards), so it may not be a bad idea to keep them unless you can get a rare 10+ point card, and even then, slot that card in another place and keep the 8.
- The one thing you have the most control over is your own pond. You can swap things in and out pretty easily, whereas you can’t affect other players’ ponds essentially at all; you can just affect how you score their ponds. Focusing on what you can control is critical in tactical games.
- You should always be swapping upwards, if you can. This seems … fairly straightforward, but try to swap a card for a more valuable card, if you can. If you end up goofing yourself a bit, you may be able to swap back later on, but that won’t always work!
- You can swap for an already-revealed card if you’d rather just flip a random card in your pond.
- Look at what your opponent is prioritizing. The four cards in their centra pond can tell you a lot about what they’re hoping to get and score, so focus on getting those cards as well to maximize how many points you can get from them.
- If your opponent is getting a lot of points, try to grab a card that capitalizes on that trend so it’s disadvantageous for them to try and block you. Similarly, if your opponent has, say, a lot of orange cards, you should try to grab an orange-scoring card. Even if it’s not in their central area, they’re going to be loathe to change up their whole strategy even if you’re getting a lot of points out of it.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- It’s an elegantly simple game. You’re just swapping cards every turn and always revealing a new one. Your scoring is simple too: your left column scores the pond to your left, the right column scores the one to the right, and the center four cards score your own pond. The game moves and adapts to changes in other players’ states just as they have to adapt to yours. I like that a lot.
- Plays very quickly. 15 minutes or less, usually, which is also great.
- Very portable. Even with the big cards, the box can still fit pretty easily inside of a bag or something. You may need a bit more space to play it than, say, a wallet game.
- I like the large cards, actually. I don’t like small cards but I usually like large cards. It might be a hand size thing but I also think they’re easier to read and see, which helps a lot for scanning during play.
- We love it when a game depends on color and includes color accessibility options. Having some small symbol to differentiate between the seasons goes a long way.
- Pretty simple to score, as well. The cards have either absolute values or values based on other symbols or colors; both are easy to tally up pretty quickly. Score each card in your pond and then total them; simple stuff.
- The variations are nice, simple ways to make the game different and interesting at alternate player counts. I like that this essentially makes the core game a three-player variant, since there’s Duel Mode for two and Team Mode for four. You can still play the core game at the other counts, though, which is also nice.
Mehs
- I’d recommend not starting with the team game. I find that teaching a team game to new players when you can teach them the free-for-all is usually a tough move, as players then don’t just feel like they’re making mistakes; they feel like they’re letting someone else down. The game’s quick enough that you can show players a free-for-all first and then move on to the team game is there’s additional interest.
Cons
- You can’t always beat luck. There are a finite number of cards in play whenever you start the game, and sometimes the best cards for the way you’re planning to arrange things aren’t in play, don’t come up, or are in your opponents’ ponds. There’s not much you can do about that, but the game is short, so I’m less inclined to penalize the game for that. There’s a whole thing in my brain about my tolerance for luck and how that’s inversely correlated with the game’s length. Shorter game, more tolerance for luck. That doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone, though, so worth noting here.
Overall: 8 / 10
Overall, I think Symbiosis is a great quick game! It’s the perfect kind of absent-minded competitive play that I enjoy, where I can talk to someone while I play without being critically focused on my moves or my strategy. That’s pretty much the ideal for casual gaming, as far as I’m concerned. Slap it on the table, have a drink or catch up with someone on how their day is going; that whole thing. The big cards and the large-format printing help a lot with that. It’s very easy to tell what someone else has and what they might be aiming for (or if their pond is a mess and they’re not really paying attention to the game). It’s a masterclass in simple, straightforward, and still elegant design. What I like most about it is that they’ve implemented variants for essentially each player count to make things more differentiated between them. At two, you can play normally, or you can play a Duel Mode that gives you more cards to pull from, but they start hidden. At four, you can play normally, or you can play a Team Mode that forces you to think about what your across-the-table partner is grabbing and planning to score. At three, well, you can play normally, but hey that’s its own thing too, I suppose. It’s a simple card game with a lot of value in its small deck, and I appreciate that. If you’re looking for a great introductory card game, a casual game for trips, or just a simple game with some good art, I’d recommend Symbiosis! It’s a lot of fun.
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