Circle of Life

About this board game

Circle of Life is a two-player strategy game played in about 40 minutes, in which species evolve to eat one another as a growing ecosystem develops.

With rules that take about a minute to learn, the game recreates key aspects of real ecosystems through a focused combinatorial challenge. Players begin with simple species and guide them toward greater diversity and complexity.

As species move higher in the food chain, they become more complex. Meanwhile, simple species reproduce, die, and evolve at higher rates than their more complex counterparts, creating an ecosystem that continually changes.

• Start with simple species and develop a more diverse ecosystem.
• See complexity increase higher up the food chain.
• Respond when abundant populations encourage another species to evolve as a predator.
• Complete the ecological cycle as dead top-level creatures feed back into the bottom of the food chain.

Population growth can create new pressures: when a species becomes numerous, another species will often evolve to eat it. This relationship between abundance, evolution, and predation gives each development a broader ecological consequence.

The Circle of Life is not simply about reaching the top of the food chain. When a creature at the top dies, it feeds back into the bottom, completing the cycle and connecting the ecosystem’s different levels.

Released in 2015, Circle of Life won the Mind Sports Olympiad’s Game of the Year award as well as the Best Combinatorial Game Award. It offers a compact strategy experience built around evolution, interdependence, and the constant circulation of life within an ecosystem.