Base price: $30.
1 – 4 players.
play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Logged plays: 8
Full disclosure: A review copy of Biomos was provided by North Star games.
Woah, I just realized how close to Gen Con we are. That’s a hellish week for me, since that means I have to have a bunch of reviews queued up for Gen Con, but we will make it work! There’s a process to all of this and I assume most of it is not, actually, watching a bunch of Monster Factory while I try to write about games. Can’t focus while I do that. Can’t listen to my audiobooks, either, sadly; I have to really be in the zone. So it’s Vampire Weekend’s new album while I’m writing this one, and who knows about the other? But they’re both coming. And speaking of reliable orbits, let’s check out Biomos, a new game from North Star games!
In Biomos, you’re creating biomes for a whole new planet. Isn’t that exciting? You’ve got a lot to do and you want to get certain terrain types together so that new biomes both natural and occasionally fantastical can emerge. They do even better when the moon is aligned with them, so keep an eye out for that opportunity. But there is only so much terrain to go around, and your fellow planetary smiths might have their own desires for their world. So whose world will see its biomes perfectly fulfilled?
Contents
Setup
This one goes pretty quickly. I’m going to explain the Advanced Variant first and then distill down the changes later. First up, place the Terrain Tokens into the pouch:
Shuffle the Basic Biomes, revealing four of them face-up next to the deck:
Shuffle the Giant Biomes, revealing four of those, too. Place the other Giant Biomes back in the box:
Give each player a player board:
You should be ready to start! Choose a player to go first.
Gameplay
This one’s pretty simple, which is always nice. Over a few rounds, you’ll take a series of turns. Each turn, you’ll take a Terrain Token from the available ones. If you take the last one, refill with five new Terrain Tokens from the bag.
Then, you place the Terrain Token somewhere on your board. For Advanced play, you can shift most of your tokens around, but there are two tokens on the board that aren’t within that semi-circular well, so they cannot be moved. If you choose to place your chosen token in the empty space for the Moon, you may move any one token on your board to another spot on your board.
If you didn’t place a Moon, you can potentially activate Planetary Events, based on if certain tokens are adjacent to each other:
- Any Desert Token: You may turn an adjacent token into a Desert.
- Any Glacier Token: You may replace this token with a random token from the bag.
- Any Desert Token next to a Water Token: You may replace the Desert Token with a Forest Token.
- Any Water Token next to a Mountain Token: You may replace the Water Token with a Glacier Token.
To finish up, if your board matches one or more Biome cards, you may claim one, placing it below your player board. If it’s a Giant Biome, do not refill the cards; otherwise, draw a new Biome from the standard Biome Deck.
play continues until all players’ boards are full. Tally scores from Biomes (as well as scores from Terrain Tokens matching the moon and points from Forest Tokens and your player board’s token type). The player with the most points wins!
For the simpler Family Variant, use the side of the board without two extra token spaces. Here, you’ll have no Planetary Effects, either. You just play normally and you can place the moon token and collect Biome cards.
Player Count Differences
Not much! Ironically, where I normally dislike random markets with more players, the limitations on the token market actually work a little better with more people. Each “round” is always five tokens, regardless of player count, so with more players, you get to see more tokens since more get taken between your turns. It’s not ideal if, say, a specific round is all tokens of one color that you need, but otherwise pretty good! With fewer players, you can again, play a bit more strategically (since you’ll want to plan ahead for various outcomes), but with more players you really see how the tactical play of this starts to emerge. What I like about that is that Biomos is a pretty short game on its own, so, the tactical play tends to still fit within the game’s whole oeuvre. No particular recommendations on player count, for this one.
Strategy
- Don’t only focus on the Giant Biomes! They’re nice and valuable, but two 5s make a 10, as they say, and if you’re consistently scoring small Biomes, you might find that you outscore a player who spends their entire game focusing on the two Giant Biomes that they’re able to get. At higher player counts, that number is even less reliable.
- Keep in mind that the Planetary Events are pretty key for mixing things up (since you can’t really replace tokens). I tend towards Glacier tokens, for instance, so I go after Biomes with more Glaciers and I use that Mountain + Water combo to generate even more for myself. It’s a pretty transparent strategy, but then again, ice is pretty transparent too.
- When you set the Moon, try to move a token so that you can set yourself up for more Biomes. This is a great way to make up for placement mistakes or to get a card that only recently appeared! Just make sure you don’t get in front of your own long-term plans.
- That said, it’s sometimes tough to figure out when you should place the Moon token. If you wait too long, you might be stuck with tokens that don’t match your board. If you go too early, your opponent(s) will wisely try to make sure you get as few as possible. I usually shoot for whatever token I have four or five of.
- You can only take one Biome per turn! I usually grab the one that’s the most at risk of being swooped by someone else. The Giant Biomes usually aren’t in that much danger.
- The board is circular, so even if your tokens aren’t physically adjacent, they’re considered “adjacent” for Biomes. The board effectively wraps around! So don’t forget that your left and right edges are considered connected. You just can’t use certain tokens to double-count.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Not a too bad game to teach. It’s pretty quick, especially with the Family Variant. You’re just drafting tokens and then matching them to cards to score. The trick is remembering that you’ve also got a circular board, so that can make things a bit more interesting. With the Advanced Variant, it just adds in more turn abilities.
- Fairly portable, too. It’s a pretty small box! You love to see it.
- I appreciate a game with a strong color scheme. The boards and cards are really beautiful! I love the art style and I think the vibrant color only adds to it. I know they were going for a bit of an ecological theme with the game to show why it matters how we treat the environment, and I think their attention to detail on the color and art front really landed.
- The sliding well for the various tokens is very satisfying. It’s just a fun schtick! I think some of my boards are a teensy bit warped, so it’s not perfect, but it still works well enough to be entertaining.
- Plays pretty quickly, which is also nice. 20 minutes is a great time for a filler game.
Mehs
- It’s a bit funny that everything is wrapped in paper for eco-friendly purposes (which I respect) and then the single promotional card for the game is in a single-use plastic. It’s probably a bit of the left hand and the right hand not communicating in sync, but it’s still a bit funny.
- I do wish that the wild icons on cards were a bit bigger, as well as the various scoring information on the player boards. There’s plenty of space for them on the various materials; they can just be a bit hard to see as-is. Maybe I’m getting old.
Cons
- There’s a fair bit of luck to whether or not the Biome cards that get revealed work for the tokens you’ve taken, which can feel frustrating at times. I think the counterpoint to this is that your strategy should be somewhat flexible, but it can be frustrating when a great card for your opponent is revealed and they just snap it up with no problem and then it takes you another two turns to score. It’s a “feels bad”, for players.
Overall: 7.5 / 10
Overall, I think Biomos is a nice little game. It’s approachable for a wide variety of players, and the generally pleasant tactile nature of how the tokens are placed into the board can be really nice for everyone. I think the Family Version is a solid game for getting folks warmed up to drafting, as a mechanic, since it lacks the innate complexity of being able to switch up and mess with various tokens during the game. That, while cool, can be a lot for new players. Here, you can just take what you’re interested in grabbing and slide the tokens around to make room for it, which works out quite nicely. For players looking for that next step, it’s built in! You can add in the extra Planetary Events of the Advanced game, which let you change your tokens to other tokens based on certain conditions. I do kind of wish getting the new tokens wasn’t just rummaging around in the bag for them (especially since certain tokens can run out), but, they can’t all be perfect. I wouldn’t necessarily call this a complex game, since, you know, 20 minutes and pretty simple play, but it’s still a good step up in complexity between the Family and Advanced play. Think of it more like a family game with the Family Variant and a casual game with the Advanced Variant.
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