Primordial Soup is a

board game A board game is a type of tabletop game that involves small objects () that are placed and moved in particular ways on a specially designed patterned game board, potentially including other components, e.g. dice. The earliest known uses of the ...

Z-Man Games Z-Man Games is an American board game company, incorporated in 1999. It was named after its founder, Zev Shlasinger. The company is known for their ''Pandemic'' series of board games, as well as being the sole publisher for the English editions o ...

. It was first published in

1997 Events January * January 1 – The Emergency Alert System is introduced in the United States. * January 11 – Turkey threatens Cyprus on account of a deal to buy Russian S-300 missiles, prompting the Cypriot Missile Crisis. * January 1 ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

by Doris & Frank under the name Ursuppe and this original version won 2nd prize in the 1998

Deutscher Spiele Preis __NOTOC__ The Deutscher Spielepreis (, ''German Game Prize'') (DSP) is an important award for boardgames. It was started in 1990 by the German magazine ''Die Pöppel-Revue'', which collects votes from the industry's stores, magazines, profes ...

Theme

Each player guides a

species A species () is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. It is the basic unit of Taxonomy (biology), ...

of primitive

amoeba An amoeba (; less commonly spelled ameba or amœba; : amoebas (less commonly, amebas) or amoebae (amebae) ), often called an amoeboid, is a type of Cell (biology), cell or unicellular organism with the ability to alter its shape, primarily by ...

drifting through the

primordial soup Primordial soup, also known as prebiotic soup and Haldane soup, is the hypothetical set of conditions present on the Earth around 3.7 to 4.0 billion years ago. It is an aspect of the heterotrophic theory (also known as the Oparin–Haldane hypothes ...

. The player controls whether and how their amoebas move, eat and procreate using the 10 biological points which s/he receives each turn. A player may evolve their species by buying

gene In biology, the word gene has two meanings. The Mendelian gene is a basic unit of heredity. The molecular gene is a sequence of nucleotides in DNA that is transcribed to produce a functional RNA. There are two types of molecular genes: protei ...

cards, which give the amoebas abilities such as faster movement. The abilities are pictured on the gene cards, showing amoebas growing

fins A fin is a thin component or appendage attached to a larger body or structure. Fins typically function as foil (fluid mechanics), foils that produce lift (force), lift or thrust, or provide the ability to steer or stabilize motion while travelin ...

tentacles In zoology, a tentacle is a flexible, mobile, and elongated organ present in some species of animals, most of them invertebrates. In animal anatomy, tentacles usually occur in one or more pairs. Anatomically, the tentacles of animals work main ...

, spines, etc. A key feature of the game is its self-balancing

ecosystem An ecosystem (or ecological system) is a system formed by Organism, organisms in interaction with their Biophysical environment, environment. The Biotic material, biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and en ...

. The food required by each amoeba is a mixture of the excrement of the other players' species. Food may become scarce and cause amoebas to starve, die and decompose into food. If one species becomes scarce, this will then cause problems for the other players, since their amoebas depend on all the other species to supply their food. Genes may mitigate this, for example by turning a species into a

predator Predation is a biological interaction in which one organism, the predator, kills and eats another organism, its prey. It is one of a family of common List of feeding behaviours, feeding behaviours that includes parasitism and micropredation ...

. 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 players' actions as each species evolves to fill

ecological niches In ecology, a niche is the match of a species to a specific environmental condition. Three variants of ecological niche are described by It describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors (for e ...

Objective

Each turn each species scores points based upon its population and genes. The game ends when a player reaches 42 points or when the last environment card is drawn. This usually happens after 5-10 rounds so the game lasts 1–2 hours.

Equipment

* 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 of different colors and shapes. * 37 biological point tokens. * 25 beads for marking

damage Damage is any change in a thing, often a physical object, that degrades it away from its initial state. It can broadly be defined as "changes introduced into a system that adversely affect its current or future performance".Farrar, C.R., Sohn, H., ...

. * 55 foodstuff cubes in each color. * 4 score markers. * 33 gene cards. * 11 environment cards which indicate the direction of drift and the thickness of the

ozone layer The ozone layer or ozone shield is a region of Earth's stratosphere that absorption (electromagnetic radiation), absorbs most of the Sun's ultraviolet radiation. It contains a high concentration of ozone (O3) in relation to other parts of the a ...

. * Game rules and reference sheets.

Reception

The reviewer from ''

Pyramid A pyramid () is a structure whose visible surfaces are triangular in broad outline and converge toward the top, making the appearance roughly a pyramid in the geometric sense. The base of a pyramid can be of any polygon shape, such as trian ...

'' #29 (Jan./Feb., 1998) stated that "''Ursuppe'' is a very fine, fun game for three or four players from the game design company/team of Doris & Frank." ''Ursuppe'' came in 2nd for the

in 1998. The game won the "Family strategy" Games 100 in 2006.

Reviews

*''

Games A game is a Structure, structured type of play (activity), play usually undertaken for entertainment or fun, and sometimes used as an Educational game, educational tool. Many games are also considered to be Work (human activity), work (such as p ...

'' #212 (Vol 29, #6) 2005 August

References

External links

''Ursuppe'' Home Page
* {{bgg, 124, ''Primordial Soup'' Board games introduced in 1997 Biology-themed board games Multiplayer games Z-Man Games games