Biotopes

About this board game

Biotopes is an ecosystem-building board game for 1–5 players, with games lasting about 90 minutes. Across five or six cycles, you will develop a vibrant ecosystem, colonize a central landscape, attract animal species, and grow their populations.

Each game begins by determining shared sources of victory points: environmental conditions that your ecosystems must overcome to thrive. At the start of every cycle, you draw cubes in four colors from your bag and place them on the matching Biotope cards. These cubes represent the organic matter extracted from the soil by the plants in your ecosystem.

During each cycle, players take turns acting on two connected levels. On the central board, you can expand your territories, move them, and even take territories from opponents. In your personal ecosystem, you play animal species cards, transfer resources produced by your plants to feed those species, and make them reproduce so your ecosystem can prosper.

• Colonize and compete across the central landscape.
• Play animal species cards and manage their populations.
• Transfer plant-produced resources to feed your animals.
• Draw new cards to prepare for future situations.

The cubes on animal species cards show the population of each species in your ecosystem. At the end of a cycle, the organic matter used during that cycle returns to your bag, ready to be drawn again in a later cycle.

When all cycles are complete, add your victory points. Species with no cubes have died out and do not count, while a fragmented presence in the central landscape can bring penalties. In Biotopes, careful resource management, population growth, and the shape of your ecosystem all matter when building a thriving natural world.