Sharrukin's Palace

So, let’s begin. The exercise is to play through Phil Eklund’s games Bios: Genesis and Bios: Megafauna, and use the results to inspire the design of a solar system, world, flora and fauna, and possibly a sentient species, all for my Human Destiny setting.

We’ll begin with Bios: Genesis. Rather than use the solitaire version laid out in the rulebook, I’ll play a complete four-handed game, making decisions for each position in turn. As best I can, I’ll resist the temptation to manipulate random chance in any given direction – the point is to let the cards and dice fall as they may, and adjust to events as they occur.

At the beginning of the game, our alternate Earth has just condensed out of the proto-planetary nebula, orbiting a star that is likely still in the early T Tauri stage of development. Things have cooled off just enough for there to be a solid surface and the beginnings of liquid-water oceans. The atmosphere is probably composed mostly of methane, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and other simple volatiles. Complex chemistry is starting to take place on the planet’s surface.

The four positions are Red (representing amino-acid chemistry, and controlling metabolism), Yellow (lipid chemistry, giving rise to cell structures), Green (pigments, controlling energy generation and storage), and Blue (nucleic acids, controlling template replication). Bios: Genesis is a competitive game, but many of the moves are cooperative in nature, and indeed some moves that might appear competitive actually open the door to closer cooperation between players. A certain amount of cooperation is, in fact, essential – the game’s random events can be brutal in their hostility toward life, so players who spend all their time tearing one another down will almost certainly fail. In its essence, the game is a matter of acquiring shares in specific assets (types of self-replicating chemistry, later species of micro- or macro-organisms), then deciding how much to invest in those assets, how to maximize value, and when to abandon a bad position.

Turn One (0 – 200 million years)

Each turn in Bios: Genesis begins with a random event from the card deck. The (first) event this turn is Theia Big Whack. This is an “Aftershock” event, which requires us to draw the next event card in the deck and implement it as well in the same turn. The second event turns out to be Mars Paleo-Ocean.

This is an interesting combination. It implements the “giant impact” theory regarding the formation of the Moon: a Mars-sized proto-planet coming along and colliding with Earth in the first 100 million years or so of its existence. Consequences for any early life on Earth would have been dire: the entire crust of the planet would have been stripped off and hurled into space!

Meanwhile, the Mars Paleo-Ocean event activates two refugia, limited spaces which are unusually friendly to life, both of them off Earth entirely. Random selection produces the Interplanetary Dust refugium, and (appropriately) the Mars Paleo-Ocean refugium. These are two locations where life might get started, moving to Earth later aboard cometary bodies or meteorites. Worldbuilding Notes: This alternate Earth will have a Moon, and it will also have a smaller neighbor planet which had life-encouraging oceans very early in its history.

With two refugia in play, the four players decide where to make their first investments. Red and Blue choose to invest in the Martian seas, while Green and Yellow both invest in the Interplanetary Dust as a possible place to form life.

The next step in the turn is to perform autocatalysis, an essentially random dice-rolling process (although the players do have some ability to manipulate the outcome) in which the “manna” or pre-biotic chemistry can be organized into a self-replicating organism. Yellow gets an unusually productive roll, organizing all of the available manna in the Interplanetary Dust refugium. Yellow takes the opportunity to produce the first micro-organism in the game, proto-bacteria from space that drift down onto Earth as it cools off from the Big Whack. In the game, this organism has a long jaw-breaker of a name (Photocarboxylation) but I’m going to label it the Space Bug.

Since Green had invested in the Interplanetary Dust refugium as well, that investment carries over to the Space Bug: Green will have a stake in that organism’s success, and will be able to help Yellow to spend resources to improve and protect it.

The next step is to carry out Darwin rolls for each micro-organism, a test to see whether the organism can replicate itself without fatal errors while also developing beneficial mutations. The Space Bug struggles with this a little, losing some of its early genetic coding, but surviving the experience.

Finally, in each turn the players have the opportunity to “purchase” mutations for their micro-organisms, genetic quirks that code for useful bits of chemistry or structure. Only Yellow has anything to buy for, and he has none of the “catalyst” disks that serve as currency, so we skip this step.

This alternate Earth already has life, but it’s barely hanging on, and there’s a lot of hostile gigayears to get through.

Turn Two (200 – 400 million years)

The event this time is Bolide Water Delivery. Comets are dropping down from the system’s outer reaches, some of them hitting this alternate Earth and delivering lots of water and other volatiles. Worldbuilding Notes: This alternate Earth, like ours, will have extensive oceans.

The arrival of lots of comets causes two new Oceanic refugia to appear: the Clay Mound and the Hydrothermal Vent. The latter refugium is particularly attractive. It’s slow to develop, but it’s very stable, and immune to many of the events that might otherwise destroy refugia before they can come to flower. Red is stuck on Mars and can’t move its investment, but Blue and Green both invest in the Clay Mound, and Yellow uses a feature of its existing organism to invest in both of the new refugia.

Autocatalysis is not very productive, although several players get a disk each out of it. No new life forms appear. Yellow’s Space Bug gets a good Darwin roll, producing another disk.

Green and Yellow each have a stake in the Space Bug, so they cooperate to purchase new mutations for it: the organism acquires Mitochondria and Chemiosis Respiration.

Turn Three (400 – 600 million years)

The alternate Earth now moves out of the so-called Hadean period – the solar system is calming down into its more or less final configuration, and there’s no longer the same degree of threat from space as before. We’re now drawing cards from the events deck for the Archaean period instead. The event this turn is an interesting one: Tropical Waterworld. The idea here is that despite the presence of extensive oceans, the planet’s crust is too warm and soft to form tectonic plates. As a result, the formation of continental crust is going to be delayed, leaving the planet covered with a world-spanning ocean, broken up only by the occasional cluster of volcanic islands. This will last until something comes along to get plate tectonics started, if that ever happens.

One thing to be concerned about: with no plate tectonics, there isn’t any way for the planet to set up a robust carbon cycle. As a result, greenhouse gases will tend to build up in the atmosphere, and a runaway greenhouse leading to Venus-like conditions is somewhat more likely. We’ll have to watch for that. Meanwhile, the whole class of Continental refugia will stay locked up behind the Tropical Waterworld card for the foreseeable future.

Worldbuilding Notes: On our Earth, plate tectonics and the early proto-continents were in existence as far back as 3.5 billion years ago. If the Tropical Waterworld event stays in effect long enough, that may mean that this alternate Earth doesn’t get started with continent-building until later in its history. That would suggest smaller continents and more surface area covered by oceans. To be resolved later, once we see how long it takes for plate tectonics to get started (if it ever does).

As in the last turn, Red is still stuck on Mars, but the other players all invest in the Oceanic refugia that are available. The Oceanic refugia are not very productive, but Red gets a good roll for the Mars Paleo-Ocean. Although not all of the available manna have been organized, Red decides that standing fast is likely to mean that he loses ground on Mars. He therefore takes the opportunity to generate a second bacterium, which we (and, apparently, a lot of Bios: Genesis players) will call the “Mars Bug.” The Mars Bug hitches a ride to Earth aboard a series of meteorites, kicked out of the Martian seas by comet impact, and takes its place beside Yellow’s Space Bug.

Both organisms do okay with their Darwin Rolls, suffering no errors and generating a few catalyst disks for spending. Yellow’s one disk is used to promote the Chemiosmosis Respiration mutation to Hyphae – this signifies the invention of DNA, and gives the Space Bug some additional protection against replication errors. Red spends two disks to purchase Riboswitches.

Turn Four (600 – 800 million years)

The event this turn is Vaalbara Breakup. The event flavor text refers to the breakup of the first “supercontinent,” and with the world locked into a Tropical Waterworld state there probably aren’t any real continents in existence. Of course, looking up Vaalbara tells me that it wasn’t much of a “supercontinent” in the first place – the two cratons involved make up only very small portions of present-day Africa and Australia. So maybe there’s not much of an inconsistency here after all.

Two new refugia are activated. The Deep Hot Biosphere reflects the possibility that life could exist very deep in the Earth’s crust or even in the upper mantle, in tiny cracks and fault-lines in the hot rock. The Radioactive Beach refugium is more bizarre, a theoretical structure in which natural radioactives (notably uranium) are deposited on a coastline, forming a crude natural reactor and providing energy input for primitive life.

As far as natural hazards go, there’s an episode of UV irradiation, weak enough that the existing organisms have no trouble dealing with it. Earth is in a cooling period, and has been for the last few turns; if one more such turn happens, it may trigger the premature end of the game as the planet becomes permanently glaciated.

All four players mostly stick with their current choices of investment. Red places an investment in the unstable Radioactive Beach refugium, less in the hopes of a second organism, more in the hope of generating some catalysts for use elsewhere.

Blue is the first player to invest in a parasite, attaching a Virus to the Space Bug’s tableau and stealing some of the resources associated with its Mitochondria. In this game, parasitism can be a hostile move, seeking to hinder the victim organism from making progress. It can also be viewed as a bid for further investment, something like a hostile takeover of a corporation! The player who deploys a parasite may be hoping that his victim will use something called the Red Queen ability to first take back the stolen resources, and then take the parasite itself into its genetic makeup. This mimics the process in natural evolution in which a parasite sometimes becomes a symbiont, benefiting both parties. In game play, the process gives the parasite player a stake in the “victim” organism, permitting him to contribute to its success in exchange for a share of the rewards.

During the autocatalytic rolls, Green’s position in the Hydrothermal Vent is very productive, bringing all but one piece of the available Manna into organization. Rather than form life at this point, Green decides to stand pat and hope for that last item to fall into place. Rolls on the Clay Mound and the Radioactive Beach make no progress, but generate several disks for various players.

The Darwin Rolls are very mixed. Red’s Mars Bug does very well, generating a whole pile of Catalyst disks. In fact, from this point on, Red’s problem is never a lack of Catalysts to spend. Instead, Red is limited by the fact that it built the Mars Bug entirely on his own, with no other player holding a stake in the organism’s success. As a result, Red is only able to spend one disk per turn, barely enough to make progress against all the forces that tend to tear down an organism as the turns pass. There is a special ability that comes with some mutations – the “Fission” ability that indicates that an organism can reproduce very quickly, spending two disks per turn. Unfortunately, the Mars Bug never seems to get the opportunity to acquire Fission.

Meanwhile, the Space Bug has almost as bad a roll as the Mars Bug had good. Even with the extra fidelity that comes with its new DNA, it accumulates so many replication errors that it has to give up the Hyphae mutation and go back to an RNA-only scheme.

Fortunately for the Space Bug, it does have the Fission ability, associated with the Mitochondria it still retains. That mutation also gives it the Red Queen ability. The Space Bug therefore uses the Red Queen twice, recovering resources from the Virus parasite, and then absorbing the Virus directly into its genetic machinery. Which is what the Blue player had in mind all along, of course. In his turn, Blue then uses his new position to promote the Mitochondria, taking the Space Bug almost back to the level of progress it had before the Darwin Roll.

Red, meanwhile, promotes its own Riboswitches mutation, developing its own form of DNA.

Turn Five (800 million – 1.0 billion years)

Another event with a Cooling Period marker will threaten the end of the game, but the next event card is The Clathrate Gun. This event represents the release of deep methane clathrates in the sea bed, acidifying the oceans and pouring methane into the atmosphere. Since methane is a very effective greenhouse gas, this flips the Earth into a warming period, postponing the threat. Some of the existing refugia are damaged by the acid oceans, removing Manna entirely from play, but a new refugium (the Alkaline Seep) appears as well.

The players assign their spare investments around the board, all of them pursuing a mixed strategy that might generate more disks to spend. Some of the autocatalytic rolls are indifferent, but both Green and Yellow get very good results.

Green finishes organizing the last of the Manna at the Hydrothermal Vent, and produces an organism whose metabolic pathways rely on acetyl coenzyme A. Since this organism came from the Hydrothermal Vent, we’ll call it the Smoker Bug. Meanwhile, Yellow gets a surprisingly productive roll from the Radioactive Beach refugium, and decides to produce a second organism, which we’ll call the Gamma Bug.

Darwin Rolls are mixed, as expected. Red’s Mars Bug again generates a bunch of disks, more than Red can easily spend. The Smoker Bug suffers a few replication errors, but not enough to do mortal damage.

During the purchase phase, Red and Yellow get into a minor tit-for-tat conflict. Some mutations or promotions lead to “oxygen spikes,” cases in which the organism’s chemistry is actively polluting the environment for others. This often involves the release of oxygen into the environment – at this point, most of the organisms are still anaerobic and have a hard time dealing with the presence of free oxygen.

In this turn, Red purchases a tmRNA mutation, which causes a weak oxygen spike that Yellow’s Space Bug has no trouble with. However, Yellow purchases Bacteriorhodopsin for the Space Bug, which triggers a stronger oxygen spike that is too much for the Mars Bug to handle, leading to the immediate loss of the tmRNA. Red grumbles, and considers ways to avoid being out-polluted. Meanwhile, Green begins to buy new capabilities for the Smoker Bug.

Interim Comments

I am very impressed with the elegance of the design of Bios: Genesis. Players tend to joke that “you don’t need to be a molecular biologist to play this game, but it helps.” Some truth to that, but if you cut through the jargon and focus on the game’s mechanics, gameplay isn’t all that difficult and the thematic elements become transparent. The mechanics themselves do a superb job of simulating the processes of natural evolution: selection pressure from the environment, innovation, “arms races” between organisms, cooperation-competition cycles, it’s all here.

For the worldbuilder, then, this game can point toward useful research, provide inspiration for creativity, and still impose the constraint of plausibility on the results. More progress next time.