So, in my quest to reach 20GG and be able to vote in the geek awards, I'm writing reviews like crazy (no digital camera to take pics, and even if I did, I'm horrible at photography). So, I've decided to write a review on this jewel of a game.

The first thing I should mention about this game is that it's funny. Funny as hell. It's the funniest game I own. Maybe it's because my group is filled with comic geniuses, or maybe we're just a silly bunch, but one thing's for sure: the pooping has a lot to do with it.

In case you don't know already, in this game each player controls a kind of amoeba that tries to survive in the Primordial soup by eating other player's "genetic material" and "excreting" material of your own, trying your best to evolve in a productive manner and not starve. In other words, what you do in this game is try to eat poop. Desperately.

In portuguese, as in many languages, I expect, poop is not a very honorable matter. In fact, we have a bunch of curse words for pooping, and could be used in many contexts. Everyone knows that old monty python recording of how flexible the F word is in English. One could probably do the same thing on the act of pooping in portuguese (at least in brazilian portuguese, in Portugal there are quite a few linguistic differences).

(warning, naughty words ahead, warning)
- "Merda!" can be easily translated as "shit". One says this one things go wrong. Quite simple, no?
- "Cagar" could be trans "taking a dump". This can be used when somebody messes something up. For an example, you lend your car to a friend of yours and he returns it with many problems that it didn't have. You could say your friend "cagou" the car.
- "Cagão" is derived from "cagar", which means "someone that takes a dump". This is slang for a lucky person (yes, now that I think about it, it really makes little sense).

In this last case it really doesn't take much imagination. A guy manages a lucky roll and you can call him "cagão", which will automatically be a pun because of the excretion in the game. Whether it was your intention or not, it doesn't matter. Same thing for a person complaining about a side of the board that ends up being green-heavy (or any other color), he can say that green "cagou" that side of the board. Another pun. More laughs. And, of course, the truly strange-sounding but perfectly reasonable moment in which a player is moving his amoebas and remembers "Oh, I forgot to poop!", and the other one doing the bookkeeping lays the issue to rest "Oh, don't fret, I've already pooped for you!". I used to joke that videogames invented a bunch of new expressions that otherwise would never be heard ("Damn, I died again!"), but now I realize the same thing happens with boardgames, but probably even to a higher degree. I don't think I'll ever hear "I've already pooped for you" in any other context, really.

This game isn't very short (about 2 hours, on the longer side of euros) and the jokes (the same ones) are still funny at the end of the game. This really something deserving of some sort of sociological or psychological study. Knock-knock jokes are lame because we've all heard them before. How can this game be funny every time when we play it?

Ok, so the humour part of it is really well covered now. Onto the actual gameplay:
The game is a simple system for the rule-bending cards to work in. A player purchases them and tries to make combos so as to make his amoebas starve as little as possible. You get points by having cards and having many amoebas on the board. The system is mostly well balanced, with my only concern about the game being the fact that you can take a major stumble and stay behind for the rest of the game with no hope of recovery. It seems that the expansion covers that with some new powers, but I haven't played the game with it yet (I just got it, but will only be able to give it a whirl in october).

Something that must be said is that I didn't like the blue amoebas: the amoebas all have numbers printed on them in black paint, and the blue background makes it reaaaally hard to tell what number it is.

Another problem with the game is it's fiddliness. Every time your amoeba eats, you have to take 3 cubes out of the board and put 2 of your color (this could change with the cards you get), so if you have 5 amoebas that don't starve (you sure hope they don't), you'll be removing 15 cubes and putting 10 on the board. That's quite a bit of cube-moving. If the other players help out, it will be a little faster, but still a little annoying.

This isn't a simple game. Sure, the rules are quite clear, but the best play can be quite often hard to find. Things get really messy after a few turns. I remember clearly when I first played it I thought "there must be some rule wrong, almost every amoeba will starve in the next turn". The rules were correct. We really were screwed, all of us.

This is something that I saw happen in all my plays of this game. In the first few turns, everything's ok, there's food for everyone. Then, someone buys the first "Struggle for survival" card, that allows a player to devour another player's amoeba (and make him lose the VP that amoeba would've given him). Oh, that's mean! Scoring in this game is extra tight because of an unique scoring mechanism, but I won't go too much into that. Just so you have an idea, the most you can score in a single turn is 10 VPs (If I'm not mistaken), and I have yet to see it happen. One VP can make quite the difference.

Another thing I'd like to comment on is something that surprised me: considering this game is over 10 years old, it is quite unique. It has unique mechanics, a unique feel. There's nothing like it. Managing your amoebas, trying to pick a good combo at the correct moment (because sometimes you won't be able to maintain it), choosing when it's better to take damage or when you should fight for something better, all this makes for quite a fun and different experience. After dozens of area-majority "let's put an auction so that I don't have to balance the prices myself" games, playing this really was a breath of fresh air. Despite all the pooping.