At this point, we’ve worked through ten turns in the Bios: Genesis game, and our alternate Earth is beginning to take shape. It spent a long time in a “tropical waterworld” state, with little or no plate tectonics, and that period ended fairly recently. Thus, what land surface the planet has is still broken up into little subcontinents and island chains. Life has moved up onto the land, but the terrestrial ecology is very simple, nothing but primitive plants and earthworm-like animals.

The four players, and their current organisms in play, are:

• Player Yellow – has Earthworms, so far the only major multicellular family in play. Also has a micro-organism we’re calling the “Gamma Bug,” due to its origins in mildly radioactive beach sands. Yellow is having some trouble generating Catalysts, the game’s “currency,” so his critters are slow to make further progress.
• Player Red – has one micro-organism, the “Mars Bug,” so called because it first evolved in the early oceans of a small neighboring planet, then arrived on the alternate Earth by way of the Meteorite Express. Red has the converse problem to Yellow – the Mars Bug generates lots of Catalysts, but no other player has an endosymbiotic stake in its success, so he has no help spending that wealth.
• Player Green – has the “Smoker Bug,” which originally formed in the hot “black smoker” fumaroles in the deep oceans. Also has a parasite in play, Cyanobacteria which are currently attached to Red’s Mars Bug.
• Player Blue – has the “Mud Bug,” which originally appeared in wet clay mounds in the seas. Has a parasite in play, a Virus which is attached to Green’s Smoker Bug. Blue has been struggling for a long time to get a parasite to “stick” long enough to become an endosymbiont, without much success.

So, let’s see if we can get to this world’s equivalent of the Cambrian era.

Turn Eleven (2.0 – 2.2 billion years)

The event this turn is Orbital Bobbing. The solar system has “bobbed” up out of the plane of the galaxy in the course of its orbit around galactic center. This has exposed the planet to a higher than usual level of cosmic radiation, which in turn may be messing with planetary climate. A minor “smite” event takes place, but the only landform in play is the Deep Hot Biosphere, which is immune.

Interstellar dust causes minor instability in the sun, leading to a weak extremophile event. Most organisms are well-protected against such extremes of heat or radiation, but Green’s Cyanobacteria parasite is killed off, and the Gamma Bug loses its photosynthetic mutation. The Earthworms are forced to make a Cancer roll, but the roll is favorable – they generate some Catalysts and take no errors.

Rather than keep trying its parasite option, Green decides to spend a Catalyst and place its spare investment in the Deep Hot Biosphere. All other players are already committed to their current investments.

Red makes a very favorable autocatalytic roll for the Deep Hot Biosphere. He organizes the last of the available manna, evicts the Green investment, and takes the opportunity to create a new micro-organism. Given its origins, this bacterium is very extremophilic, capable of thriving in temperatures and pressures that would kill most other organisms. We’ll call this one the “Hot Bug.” Once again, Red has an organism that will produce lots of Catalysts (it has plenty of red “metabolism” genes). Yet, by evicting the Green investment before creating this organism, he has all the advantages and disadvantages of sole ownership again.

Darwin Rolls are generally favorable, generating at least one or two disks for everyone. Red, of course, earns so many Catalysts with his two organisms that he maxes out in all four colors. Blue gets a very favorable roll and selects a healthy assortment of disks.

With so much wealth available, every player buys or promotes at least one mutation per organism. One of Green’s purchases sets off a weak oxygen spike, enough to kill off the Blue Virus attached to the Smoker Bug.

Turn Twelve (2.2 – 2.4 billion years)

This turn’s event is Gaia Ozone Layer. The alternate Earth acquires an ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, protecting the surface against any further UV irradiation events. The period is otherwise calm and uneventful – no new refugia appear, a mild oxygen spike inflicts no casualties, and Earth is currently in a Cooling period.

Blue, possibly fatigued by the continued failure of parasitism, decides to keep his spare investment in reserve. Green attaches his Cyanobacteria parasite to Blue’s Mud Bug, stealing a red cube from one of its mutations.

Since there are no active refugia, there are no autocatalytic rolls to be made. All players move on to the Darwin Rolls, which are rather unproductive – only Green manages to harvest a significant number of Catalysts. Several organisms take damage to replication errors, especially Green’s Cyanobacteria parasite, which is driven into extinction again.

During purchases, the major development is the promotion of Green’s Smoker Bug to multicellular status. Yellow and Green both make purchases that end with the creation of Sea Stars.

The new organism takes up the “plant” role in a growing marine ecology. At the moment it’s the only multicellular life at sea (the Flatworms having moved onto the land hundreds of millions of years ago) but it won’t be alone for long.

Turn Thirteen (2.4 – 2.6 billion years)

The event is Pangaea Breakup. A supercontinent is divided by new ocean rifts, sending the planet’s small continents scattering across its surface. The event actually brings two new refugia into play, the Hydrogen Volcano and the Warm Pond (shades of Darwin there). It’s very late in the game, but at least Blue and Green might have places to put their spare investments if they don’t want to keep messing with parasitism. A UV irradiation event takes place, but is blocked by the ozone layer. Earth is again in a Cooling period.

Blue assigns its space investment to the Hydrogen Volcano, while Green assigns to the Warm Pond. Blue’s autocatalytic roll is somewhat productive, while Green makes little progress. The existing micro-organisms do reasonably well with their Darwin Rolls, generating a few disks and suffering no unrecovered errors.

Red dominates the purchase phase, making progress with his two organisms and helping Blue to promote the Mud Bug to multi-cellular status. The growing marine ecology sees the addition of Lamp Shells (brachiopods), which have a lower metabolic rate (fewer red and yellow items in play) and so take up the “plant” trophic level. The Sea Stars are promoted to be “herbivores,” developing a lifestyle of cracking open Lamp Shells to get to the juicy stuff inside.

 

Turn Fourteen (2.6 – 2.8 billion years)

This turn’s event is T Tauri Superflare. Stimulated by an infall of interstellar dust, the sun goes into a period of massive flare activity, hitting the planet with radiation and coronal mass ejections. The Hydrogen Volcano and Warm Pond refugia are damaged. An extremophile event occurs, seriously damaging Yellow’s Gamma Bug. All of the multicellular organisms are forced to make Cancer Rolls, but none of them take any unrecoverable errors. A UV irradiation event is deflected by the planetary ozone layer. Earth remains in a Cooling period.

Blue’s investment is stuck in the Hydrogen Volcano, so Blue invests a disk there to improve his odds of organizing the remaining manna. Green deploys a parasite, this time a Salmonella organism which attaches to Blue’s Lamp Shells.

Blue gets a mediocre result from the autocatalytic roll in the Hydrogen Volcano refugium, and decides to activate a new micro-organism in the hopes that he can make some progress in the time that’s left. This organism’s metabolic pathway is based on the condensation of thioesters found in the outgassing plume of volcanoes, so we’ll call this latecomer the “Volcano Bug.”

Darwin rolls are moderately productive, although Red’s two organisms generate tremendous wealth of Catalysts, maxing him out in all four colors again.

Yellow and Green cooperate to purchase organs for the Sea Stars, eyes and a brain. Both players are looking at what’s left of the event deck, which has two cards in it. If those events are kind, Green should have enough time to finish evolving the Sea Stars and move them onto the land.

Meanwhile, Red’s long-suffering Mars Bug has finally accumulated enough genetic complexity to be promoted to multi-cellular status. He promotes it to become Arrow Worms. The marine ecology is now full, with three multi-cellular sea organisms in existence. The players compare metabolic rates and determine that the Sea Stars are in the “carnivore” role, the Arrow Worms are “herbivores,” and the Lamp Shells remain in the “plant” role at the bottom of the food chain.

Turn Fifteen (2.8 – 3.0 billion years)

The event this turn is Comet Impactor (Aftershock) with Mackenzie Flood Basalts. This brings both of the remaining event cards out in a single turn, and these are not gentle events! It looks as if anyone still hoping to emerge onto the land just had his hopes dashed.

Two “smite” events damage the Warm Pond refugium, leaving it with a single cube, not a good prospect for development. The Geothermal Zinc refugium does appear, but since this is going to be the last turn of the game, it seems unlikely to get anywhere.

Meanwhile, the comet impact and massive volcanic eruption, between them, create a terrible extremophile event, rendering the seas very inhospitable to life. Blue’s Volcano Bug, and Yellow’s Gamma Bug, both take serious damage and are probably knocked out of contention. Even Blue’s Lamp Shells are forced to give up one of their organs. The other multi-cellular organisms wide out the shock, and (appropriately) Red’s Hot Bug pulls through as well. Earth is currently in a sharp Warming period.

Green is the only player with a spare investment, and he decides to attach his Salmonella parasite to the Lamp Shells again. No autocatalytic rolls take place. Darwin Rolls are as expected, although the Gamma Bug adds insult to injury by losing yet another cube to an uncovered error. The Gamma Bug is almost extinct at this point, so it’s probably good that the game is about to end.

Every player does his best to improve his organisms during the purchase phase, but no one is in a position to perform any new promotions. Yellow’s Sea Stars come the closest, being only one cube short at this point – one more turn and they would probably have crossed the finish line. Players check metabolic levels for the marine animals, and end up with the same distribution as before: Sea Stars at the carnivore level, Arrow Worms at the herbivore level, and Lamp Shells placidly being eaten by everyone else.

Final Scores

• Red: 15 VP for cubes, 3 VP for Bionts in organisms, 6 VP for sole share in the Arrow Worms, 3 VP for a one-half share in the Lamp Shells, total 27 VP. Red has 10 Catalysts at the end of the game.
• Yellow: 15 VP for cubes, 3 VP for Bionts in organisms, 4 VP for a one-third share in the Earthworms, 6 VP for a one-half share in the Sea Stars, total 28 VP. Yellow has 1 Catalyst at the end of the game.
• Blue: 9 VP for cubes, 3 VP for Bionts in organisms, 4 VP for a one-third share in the Earthworms, 3 VP for a one-half share in the Lamp Shells, total 19 VP. Blue has 1 Catalyst at the end of the game.
• Green: 14 VP for cubes, 3 VP for Bionts in organisms, 4 VP for a one-third share in the Earthworms, 6 VP for a one-half share in the Sea Stars, total 27 VP. Green has 1 Catalyst at the end of the game.

The scores are much closer together than I might have expected. Yellow wins by a single point, Red is in second place since his wealth of Catalysts breaks the tie, and Green comes in third. Blue is dead last, which doesn’t surprise me – he invested a lot in a parasitic strategy that didn’t pay off very well, and he persistently fell behind in developing his Lamp Shells.

Final Comments and Worldbuilding Notes

This was a very interesting exercise! I suspect if I were to use Bios: Genesis for worldbuilding on a regular basis, I wouldn’t bother taking such detailed notes. The details of which microscopic bug gained which mutation when are probably far down in the weeds. Still, this gave me a plausible Earthlike world, one which is different enough from our own that it ought to give me plenty of interesting details to work with.

One thing I noticed as I was working through this game. The game’s rulebook and supporting materials claim that each turn represents 200 million years, and that’s how I marked the turns in my game log. It makes sense in one respect – the game is supposed to represent the time from Earth’s formation to the end of the Precambrian period, almost exactly 4 billion years. At one event card per turn, a deck of twenty event cards works out to the right length of time.

The problem, of course, is that some turns use two event cards, not one, as a result of the Aftershock rule. It’s also possible for the game to be shortened, if multicellular life appears early and some of the Archean Era event cards are discarded, as happened here. Even if that doesn’t happen, though, you can expect to see three or four Aftershocks in the course of the game. Which means that no matter what the players do, the game is most likely to last on the order of 15-17 turns.

For worldbuilding purposes, then, it might make more sense to treat each turn as covering a longer period of time. A round figure of 250 million years per turn seems reasonable. That would draw out the timeline of this alternate Earth a bit more. Something like the following seems probable, based on the events we’ve seen in this playthrough:

• 0.0 billion years – Formation of the solar system.
• 0.1 billion years – Proto-planetary collision gives rise to a large Moon.
• 0.2 billion years – First life appears on the planet’s surface, carried there by interplanetary dust.
• 0.3 billion years – Period of cometary impacts delivers enough water to cover most of the planet’s surface. A small neighboring planet already has oceans which are giving rise to native life.
• 0.5 billion years – Activation of plate tectonics stalls, leaving the planet in a “tropical waterworld” state in which the formation of continents is long delayed. Micro-organisms arrive from the neighboring planet, carried by meteorites kicked up by cometary impacts there.
• 1.25 billion years – First “native” microbial life appears in the planet’s oceans.
• 1.5 billion years – Long “snowball” period of almost total glaciation begins. Life continues to develop in the seas, near deep-ocean vents and in the more or less ice-free equatorial zone. The first multicellular life appears, similar to terrestrial flatworms. An “oxygen crisis” begins, as the oceans become increasingly rich with dissolved oxygen.
• 2.0 billion years – The “snowball planet” period comes to an end. Plate tectonics finally get under way, beginning the formation of continents. The oceans are unable to absorb any more dissolved oxygen, and deep deposits of banded iron are formed on the sea beds. Free oxygen begins to appear in the atmosphere, as primitive plants and worm-like animals emerge onto the new land-masses.
• 2.3 billion years – Increasing oxygen concentrations and a decline in worldwide lightning strikes lead to a “nitrogen famine.” Life faces a bottleneck, until various micro-organisms invent biochemical methods for “fixing” nitrogen.
• 2.8 billion years – The planet develops a protective ozone layer, fostering the evolution of complex life forms. More families of multi-cellular life begin to appear in the seas, beginning with starfish-like echinoderms.
• 3.5 billion years – Major cometary impact, followed by a massive volcanic episode, leads to a mass extinction which delays the further colonization of the land. The marine ecology is quite advanced by this point, with echinoderms, chaetognaths, brachiopods, and other species filling the shallow seas.
• 3.75 billion years – The “present day.” Many species of coastal and shallow-sea life are preparing to colonize the land, joining the primitive ecology that has already existed there for over 1.5 billion years.

Next, I’m going to break open the next game in the Bios series – Bios: Megafauna – and see how this planet develops through its equivalent of the Paleozoic era.