This game is going to wow you visually, I promise!
Ecologies was designed by a science teacher to help kids learn and get excited about food webs, biomes, predators, and all that great Circle of Life Stuff.
It’s a card game illustrated in a beautiful vintage Victorian style. The art alone makes this game worth owning, it is spectacular! And the game itself is fun to play and an excellent gameschooling resource for homeschool or public school science!
The game includes 77 unique organisms, all color coded according to 7 biomes. As you can see, the Desert Biome cards are pink (and aren’t those illustrations just lovely?!?)
Each card contains information about what each organism eats and what it is eaten by, while the Biome cards include a tidbit of info about the environment and a Healthy Habitat Bonus, an extra ability or advantage a player gets when his biome is healthy.
On a turn, a player draws 2 cards, trades cards with other players, and then plays up to 2 cards.
Each food web must start with a Biome card and a Producer card, both on the first level. After those two cards are played, players begin building their food webs with as many organisms of different levels as they can collect.
In this Desert Biome, I have 3 producers: Poppy, Prickly Pear, and Ocotillo. These three organisms support the entire food chain by feeding its smallest members, Crickets and Beetles. Lizards and Scorpions eat Crickets and Beetles, so they go in level 3, and so on until you have the big animals that are at the top of the food chain to finish it off.
Each card includes the trophic level, or where it fits in to the food chain. SD organisms (scavengers/decomposers) come first followed by organisms in levels 1-4. Organisms in lower trophic levels are worth fewer points than organisms of a higher trophic level. (If you don’t know what a trophic level is…neither did I until I played this game!!)
Biotic and Abiotic Factor cards are the wrench in the game and can be played to harm another player or help oneself. Having an element of disaster in a game makes it so much more fun!
Players keep drawing, trading, and playing until someone gets 12 points.
This is a fantastic game to play during a study of biology, but it’s also great for practice adding decimals, as most of the cards’ point values are a decimal number. It’s a math AND science gameschooling win!!!
My kids really enjoy playing this game. They love animals and learning about different habitats and we’ve learned a lot about new organisms and what eats what. The cards are so beautiful and colorful, it’s a fantastic science game!
Collecting the right cards and figuring out which ones to play can be tough… Ecologies is actually a relatively difficult game to win.
It takes good strategy, persistence, and a persuasive disposition (to get people to trade with you… :).
When a player has completed reached the top level and has achieved the “Healthy Biome” status, other players can check it over to make sure everything is accurate. This is also a fantastic gameschool element – I love having my kids double check each other’s work and learn from and help each other.
We have really enjoyed playing Ecologies in our homeschool science study of animals, habitats, and biology. We think you will love it too! Thanks so much to Montrose Biology for sharing it with us!
