Simply superb. Works well with non-gamers, too. We do play with a variant, however: we don't stack the tiles as called for in the rules. Instead we just smear them around the board, and each turn players can choose a plain back or circle back as they wish. See my review here on BGG.

I haven't yet played it, but I find this CCG to be about the worst rip-off of any CCG I've seen. For a very expensive Costa Rica starter set, which claims it's enough for two players, I received the one starting card plus 48 playing cards to make two player hands. The rules say you have to have 40 or fewer cards in a single player's hand, so you start with 24 each, no problem. But there are only 13 different types of cards, and only 7 of those are different species types: two mammals, one reptile, one amphibian, one arachnid, and two insects. Most of those include 4 or 6 copies of each! Each player starts with identical hands, since many of the cards have six copies of each, and the rules say you can't have more than three identical cards in your hand.

Then there are six(!) forest fires, each of which can reduce your opponent's draw pile by five cards at once. Since you win by depleting your opponent's draw pile, and you start with a five-card hand, this means each player can potentially reduce his opponent's draw pile from its initial 19 cards to a mere four cards simply by using Forest Fires!!! The game designer clearly has no sense of balance and the game was obviously not playtested by real gamers.

It may actually be a fine game when played - I don't know, I'm a bit too disgusted to try it and I'm *not* spending any more money on boosters - but the starter set really needed more variety, especially in species. None of the starting species are plants. None are predators. None have Sunrise or Sunset powers, covered in the rules. In short, it's not made by a real game company, but by someone who has a vague notion of what a game should be.

AND ... even worse ... it doesn't satisfy those people, gamers or non-gamers, likely to be attracted to the game in the first place. By this I mean there are only seven different species in an expensive starter set, and someone drawn to this game will want to see more. Biodiversity is a big appeal, but you have to spend a lot in boosters to get it. Bah.