I'll play almost anything, once. How much further play the game sees is largely about how much I don't like it. When it comes down to it most games are at least playable. So this review will start with a game description, move to what I don't like, and finish with whatever I think is outstanding.

So...

Primordial Soup
Guide your race of amoeba in the prehistoric sludge. Use your energies to breed, or to evolve new genes that will help your amoeba compete for survival.


If you reckon you know your way around how Primordial Soup works, you can skip the dry boring Contents and Rules Overview bits, and go down to the guts of What's Not To Like, and What Stands Out.


Contents
I have an early Doris & Frank UrSuppe edition. The set is English friendly, though German slightly friendlier.

+ 1 large four-fold board, blue-grey monochrome and sturdy enough
+ 4 colours of 7 wooden "amoeba" each. (Some assembly required.)
+ 220 "food" cubes. (Also called "poop".) ie 55 of each of the 4 colours.
+ 4 score marker cylinders (one each colour).
+ 37 "BP" counters in two sizes. (not "Build Points", these are "Biological Points")
+ 25 damage marker balls (grey beads with a hole in the middle)
+ 33 colour gene cards (with 20 different genes on them)
+ 11 colour "environment" cards
+ basic wooden dice
+ 4 b&w paper player aids showing turn summary and all gene descriptions.

Each colour of Amoeba pieces are a different shape so it's tempting to think this is colourblind friendliness, but the cubes and score markers are only distinguished by colour.

The Doris & Frank gene cards for international shipment were printed in colour German on one side and black and white English on the other. (Gene cards are never concealed.) The (2007?) Z-Man edition is in full colour in English.



The three four Amoebas. Well, the four types... there's seven of each type.


Primordial Soup Rules Overview (You can of course skip this bit.)

Objective Dominate the soup. Have as many amoeba and/or genes as you can at the end of each round to rack up the score. Highest score when someone reaches/exceeds 42 points wins.

Setup The board starts with no amoebas but with two cubes of each colour in every square, so setup can take a few minutes. Players then take turns placing one amoeba each anywhere on the board, and then again take turns (in reverse order) placing a second amoeba. Each player's first amoeba starts with one Damage marker.



The Board. (Score track up the right side.)


A Game Turn (has six phases). Every player plays in sequence in each phase, before starting the next phase.

Move and Feed. Amoebas either Drift in the direction of the prevailing current (which changes each turn) or else the player pays a BP (Biological Point) to roll the dice to hopefully twitch in a more profitable direction. So each Amoeba will move one space, or possibly stay where it is.

Wherever it ends up it must Feed, by consuming three cubes of other players' colours, and poops out two cubes of its own colour. (Which can then be eaten by other players' amoebas of course.)

If three appropriate food cubes are not available, no cubes are eaten and a Damage Marker is added to the amoeba.

Environment Changes. A new environment card is turned up, which shows which way the current will be for the following turn. It also shows an Ozone Thickness. Each Gene Card shows a number of Mutation Points. If a player has more total Mutation Points on their Gene cards than the Ozone Thickness allows, they must forfeit the extra Genes and/or pay Biological Points to make up the difference.

(This effectively limits each player to roughly three or four genes most of the time.)

New Genes. Players may use BP (Biological Points) to buy any unbought genes, costing variously 2 to 6 BP, noting that four genes are only available as upgrades. Genes are kept long term, and may be used as often as needed by all your amoeba. Some cost 1BP to use.

Cell Division. Each player in turn gets 10 more BP (biological points) and may now buy new amoebas to place on the board, at a cost of 6 BP each. A player cannot have more than 7 amoebas on the board.

Amoebas Die. Any amoeba with two damage markers now dies. It is returned to the player's supply (and may be re-bought during Cell Division on a later turn.) Two of each colour food/poop cubes are placed on the board where the amoeba corpse was, ready to be munched by other amoeba.

Scoring. (Note this happens just after amoebas die.) There is a non-linear score table. Having more than two amoeabas will score points for a player, having more than 2 genes will score points as well. The more of each or either, the better the score.

If one or more players have reached 42 or more points after everyone has scored, the game ends.



The board has some fun Doris artwork unobtrusively around the edges.


Some cute rules include that the players' score markers never share a spot... they leap-frog over each other so that there's always a clear 1st/2nd/3rd/4th. Also, each phase is played in the player order ("Ascending" or "Descending") that gives the most advantage to the currently losing player.

The variety available in the genes is diverse, allowing a variety of changes in how your amoebas breed, feed, and move, or granting abilities to attack other players or defend against attack.


Internet Resources

The Doris and Frank UrSuppe web page comes in English or German, has all kinds of stuff including F.A.Q., and also has some translations in French, Spanish, and Italian.

The Z-Man Primordial Soup web page also has files in Portugese.



With a Doris & Frank game, you can bet more Doris artwork is on the cards.


So What's Not To Like?

So after all the "irrelevant" waffle above that I hope you skipped if you weren't interested, here's the juicy bits... but to most of these "common" complaints I (unusually in my reviews) do have a personal mitigation to offer.

The learning curve as you figure out all the gene cards and how they work together can put new players at a significant disadvantage.

Downtime is a complaint during the "move and feed" phase. While one player is working their way through up to seven amoeba, deciding which genes to use and whether to spend BP or just Drift, possibly mulling over which poop to eat and then actually dealing with the bits... there's often not much for other players to do.
Mitigation: During one player's turn, have other players actually do the feed/poop accounting while the current player just points and makes decisions. This isn't always possible, but usually it is. It gives other players something to do in the game AND speeds up the flow.

It's a long game with many people clocking in at over two hours for what is strategically a middle weight game with a light theme, some folks just don't want it to go that long.
Mitigation: If you employ the "other players do the eat/poop" idea, the game time shortens. Also, early games take longer while players figure out the genes and their interactions.

It's "fiddly" to manage all the poop.

There's some luck? The environment cards come up in random order of course, so you can't plan explicitly for the prevailing Drift and the Ozone Protection. And if you don't like the Drift and pay to Move, you still only roll dice for direction.
Mitigation: This game is partially about eliminating the impact or even the possibility of "misfortune" by use of gene combinations and by plans which accomodate "the worst". Personally, I believe the impact of the "luck" element is less than some people imagine. You can't keep all your amoeba alive all the time... that's "life"!

Repetitive. If you play this game too often you may find yourself thinking "move, eat, build... move, eat, build... move, eat, build..."

"Killer Gene Combos" can win the game.
Mitigation: While obviously some gene combinations are better than others... therein is much of the strategy... if someone is gearing up to a great combo then someone else tends to buy out genes to prevent the combo being completed. Games see a bit of act/react in gene choices.

Dry. If you don't enjoy the theme, the game likely devolves to dryness.

Only 3 or 4 players. There's an expansion for 5/6. The only sensible 2P variant I've seen is playing two colours each. (Each player gets their lower score at the end.)



During play, the amoebas often clump up and compete.


So What Stands Out?

Beautifully tight theme integrates extremely well with the game play. It's almost sort of a simulation.

It's an unusual game. I can't think of another like it, though since it involves "evolving" your species I know it's sometimes compared to Evo, which I haven't played.
(NB at time of writing a little over 500 BGG users had rated both Primordial Soup and Evo. Of those, about half rated Primordial Soup higher, about a quarter rated Evo higher, and about a quarter rated them the same.)

Eating Poop! And poop jokes abound. (If you're into poop jokes, that is. Otherwise ... don't think about eating poop, they're just "food cubes". No worries.)

Nice strategic weight being "not too heavy not too light"... making it playable for a wide range of tastes.

Replayability is good. (Unless you burn out and find it repetitive.) There's many different genes and combinations to try, and having been clobbered by a strategy one time you can vie to be the one to use it next time and/or think how to block it. Plus the small injection of variation from different Drift sequences means no two games are going to be the same.

Turn flow is well designed with some interesting implications. New amoebas are bought before amoebas die, so the newly dead are not immediately available for restocking. Amoebas die just before scoring, so even someone running the "full compliment" of amoebas doesn't always score full points, thus still leaving room for "better" amoeba farming skills. And buying new genes happens just before you get your new BP for the turn, so you spend the turn cycle constantly weighing up saving your BP for genes vs the more immediate needs of your very mortal amoeba.



An amoeba with two damage is about to die, and turn into a poop rainbow. The blue amoeba will soon be on Easy Street!


Overall Primordial Soup is pretty much at the right spot in the rankings, at somewhere in 100-150 range. It doesn't grab everyone, and you may not want to play it every week, but it's extremely well designed, fun when you do fetch it out, and a unique gaming experience even in a large collection. It's well deserving of its reprint by Z-Man games.

The interaction level is medium, planning which food to eat to annoy other players, planning where to die, and choosing genes that let you interfere with each other more directly.

I wouldn't take it out with all non-gamers, but I'd happily bring it out for a family that sometimes game together, or a group of casual gamers. I've owned this game for many years, and still like to get it on the table from time to time.