Circle of Life, Winner of the Mind Sports Olympiad's Game of the Year award, and winner of the Best Combinatorial Game Award, is a strategy game where players evolve species to eat each other in a growing ecosystem.
Despite 1-minute rules, the game recreates key aspects of real ecosystems:
- It starts with simple species, which evolve to become more diverse and complex.
- Species get more complex as you go up the food chain.
- Simple species reproduce, die, and evolve at higher rates than more complex ones.
- When a species' population is high, another species often evolves to eat it.
- When a critter at the top of the food chain dies, it feeds back into the bottom, to complete the Circle of Life.
For more insight into the game, visit this link.