Following the North Star

In Nature Jurassic, size is power, and the bigger your species, the more untouchable you'll feel. Yet, no matter how big you are in Nature, no species is immune to hunger.

The Nature board game takes place over hundreds of millions of years as species adapt to a continually changing environment. It isn’t easy to relate to such a vast expanse of time, so I have a theory that most people internalize the story as taking place over a lifetime.

Nature combines lessons from my days as a pro-Magic player and everything I’ve learned from 12 years as lead designer of the award-winning Evolution series. 

Four years ago, we raised a bunch of money to make a video game version of our hit strategy game Evolution. Evolution is a super-thematic game where you evolve species by giving them traits, to help them adapt and survive in an ever-changing ecosystem:  We've had 5 people working full time on...

Two weeks ago, we made a call to get playtesters for the next game in the Evolution series, Oceans.  Our plan was to get 100 dedicated playtesters.  To our surprise we received over 1,200 submissions! 

The most massive project North Star Games has ever tackled is starting to surface. After going dark for nearly a year, the next stand-alone game in the Evolution series is finally coming up for air. 

At North Star Games, we love designing deep games. But it's getting harder to justify doing it, because depth may be out of fashion a little. So we've decided to evangelize for it. Here are three ways to understand the great pleasures of depth.