Redesigning Evolution: Climate

One Module to Rule Them All

I always knew Climate would be part of the Nature system, but I saved it for last because it would be the hardest to design.  With Evolution: Climate being the most beloved game in the series, I knew the successor would face heavy scrutiny before the first copy shipped. It had big shoes to fill.

So I started with the players.

I reread every review, comment, and forum thread I could find, then surveyed more than 400 Evolution: Climate fans with two simple questions: What should we never change? And what would you most like us to change?

Those answers became our guiding principles.

What to keep. The fourth trait slot stood out immediately — people loved the extra variety it gave their species, so Nature: Climate keeps it. Fans also wanted more traits overall, so Climate adds eight new traits to the base game's eight, making it our largest module yet. Because Nature allows duplicate traits, the number of possible species combinations grows far beyond a simple doubling.

What to change was harder to solve: players wanted the climate to swing more dramatically, but they also wanted the game to feel less random. Those goals sound contradictory — more movement should mean more chaos, not less. But looking closely at Evolution: Climate, we realized the problem wasn't how far the climate moved. It was when. You adapted your species, then learned which way the climate had gone. You could make the smartest possible decision and still get punished for it. 

In Evolution: Climate, you adapted your species before learning which direction the climate would move. You could make the best decision possible and still be punished. So we flipped the sequence.

In Nature: Climate, the climate moves first, then you adapt.

That single change allowed us to make the climate swings much more dramatic while giving players more strategic control. You know where the climate will end before deciding which deck to draw from and how to adapt your species.

Getting those movements right took real work. One of my goals for the module was for it to tell different stories every time — I want players to think they've mastered the strategy, play again, and land in an entirely different ecosystem. A game might start temperate and slide into a blizzarding ice age. Another might spike into scorching heat. Another might swing hard in one direction and then reverse. 
We modeled more than a dozen candidate systems and ran hundreds of thousands of simulations on each, tracking how fast the climate reached its extremes, how long it stayed there, and how often it reversed. The system had to move in a way that felt dramatic, but it also had to stay simple enough to explain at the table.

Here is a visualization of the system we decided upon. 

With this model, a full Ice Age flipping straight into a Scorching Age will happen once in every two million games. Rare enough to become the kind of story your group still talks about years later, if you ever see it.

We weren't just balancing numbers. We were designing stories.

The two extremes are also deliberately asymmetric. In an ice age, large, round animals have an advantage because they retain heat more efficiently. Think mammoths. In extreme heat, the advantage reverses: smaller animals and heat-dissipating traits become valuable.

Those differences ripple through the ecosystem. Predators generally need to be at least as large as their prey, so cold climates can support large predators in ways that extreme heat cannot.

Food availability changes, too. Warm, humid environments can produce enormous amounts of plant food, supporting far more animal life.

So the climate track isn't simply a difficulty meter.

It changes what kind of game you're playing.

Different traits become valuable. Different species combinations work. Predator-prey relationships change. The synergies change.

We also wanted the extremes to actually hurt. If an ice age could support as many thriving species as a lush rainforest, the simulation wouldn't feel right. The rules become deliberately more punishing at the edges of the climate track. That's where the world should feel like it's closing in.

The art follows the same philosophy. We got permission from Catherine Hamilton to use her original watering-hole artwork as inspiration, and Jackie Davis built a new visual style around that homage. We wanted Nature: Climate to feel connected to its predecessor without simply reproducing it.

Then we tested. A lot.Our core group played Nature hundreds of times each — digital builds, AI opponents, tabletop, Tabletop Simulator. That volume mattered because one of my goals for Nature has always been to support serious competitive play, a goal shaped by my time on the Magic: The Gathering pro tour. I love how Magic rewards discovering synergies and exploring interactions, and with Nature I wanted that same depth, but with more of the outcome in players' hands.

The clearest proof came from Edward, one of our testers. I played about 30 games against him. Early on, I was probably the stronger player. But as he learned the system, he became extraordinarily consistent — even a bad start rarely stopped him from finishing first or second.

That's exactly what we were after: enormous variety, real drama, ecosystems that transform as the climate does, and extremes that feel genuinely extreme.
But underneath all of it, skill still had to matter. The climate changes. The ecosystem changes. The story changes. But your decisions still decide the outcome.