From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Primordial Soup
Close-up of a game in progress
Designer	Doris Matthaus & Frank Nestel
Players	3 to 4 (5-6 with extension)
Age range	12 years and up
Setup time	approx. 10 minutes
Playing time	90+ minutes
Random chance	Medium
Skills required	Dice rolling, Bidding, Capture
BoardGameGeek entry

Primordial Soup is a board game created by Doris Matthaus & Frank Nestel, first published in 1997 in Germany by Doris & Frank Z-Man Games under the name Ursuppe. The game won 2nd prize in the 1998 Deutscher Spiele Preis. The original German print features all cards with words on them in both the English and German language. The rules and reference sheets in an all English version can be freely downloaded from the designer's web pages.

Each player guides a species of primitive amoeba drifting through the primordial soup. The player controls whether and how his amoeba's move, eat and procreate. Some of these actions may cost a certain amount of bio-points, of which ten are awarded to each player each round. In addition, a player may evolve his entire species by buying gene cards with his bio-points, which instantly give his amoeba's increased capabilities, such as faster and more accurate movement. The capabilities are neatly pictured on the gene cards by showing amoeba's that grow fins like a fish, tentacles like an octopus, spines like a hedgehog, etc.

A key point of the game is its self-balancing ecosystem: The food required by each amoeba each round is a healthy mixture of the excrements of the other player's species (represented by colored wooden cubes). Over the course of the game, food may become scarce and subsequently may cause amoeba's to die, which then decompose into food cubes. If a certain player's species becomes scarce due to multiple deaths, this will then cause problems for the other players, since their amoebas depend on all the other players species' excrements as a food source. Genes can be bought to partially evade these problems, for example by turning into a predator. However, this still requires some healthy prey to be available. Furthermore, the other players may react by turning their amoebas into predators themselves, growing spines for defense, or simply increase their procreation rate to offset the losses. The success of each strategy highly depends on the other player's actions as each player tries to find his niche in the primordial soup's ecosystem.

After each round, each species' state is evaluated and scores a certain amount of victory points for its player. The game ends if a player reaches 42 or more victory points in total, usually after 5-10 rounds, lasting 60-120 minutes.

• A game board with spaces representing the primordial soup, a scoring track, and a compass diagram.
• Two dice
• 28 pegged discs representing amoebas, in four sets distinguishable by color and shape.
• 37 tokens for scoring "biological points"
• 25 beads for marking damage to amoebas.
• 55 cubes of each of the 4 amoeba colors, variously representing potential food and extretia of different amoeba types.
• 4 score markers.
• 33 cards representing available genetic mutations. The cards have colored front and a blue & white backside, with the front side showing the card's description in German, while the backside is written in English.
• A deck of 11 cards showing direction of current and ozone layer thickness.
• Game rules and reference sheets.

• Ursuppe Home Page
• Primordial Soup at BoardGameGeek

This board game-related article or section is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.