Hairy Museum of Natural History

Zygote Games has recently released a new card game: Bone Wars—The Game of Ruthless Paleontology.

Inspired by the bitter rivalries between larger-than-life paleontological personalities at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, Bone Wars pits researchers against one another in a battle for scientific immortality. Players assume the roles of such luminaries as Edward Drinker Cope, Othniel Charles Marsh, Charles Sternberg, or Barnum Brown and attempt to outperform and undercut their competitors in three different arenas: collecting fossils in the field, mounting skeletons in the museum, and correcting (or criticizing) each others’ work by raising controversies.

During the Field Season phase, players collect fossil cards and can play cards that improve their own odds (or hamper their opponents’ success, like the Fist Full of Fossils card shown here). During the Museum Work phase, players assemble their fossil cards into skeletons. In the Controversy phase, players analyse each others’ reconstructions and use cards in their own hands to revise each others’ work. “Prestige Points” are given for assembling bones into skeletons or successfully revising another player’s work, and are taken away each time your skeletons are modified by a competitor.

The game takes a little while to get going while the players get used to the different phases of play, but after the first few turns it starts moving along at a brisk pace. A fair amount of space is advisable since each player will need to place multiple cards on the table, and one’s ‘personal space’ fills up quickly. One slight difficulty is the size of the text on the cards—to make the most of the Controversy phase, one needs to compare small descriptions on the fossil cards in one’s hand with similarly small text on other players’ Dinosaur cards. This can bog down the Controversy phase a little bit, but it does lend an advantage to anyone who has played enough hands to learn a few tidbits about dinosaur anatomy.

All in all, Bone Wars is an enjoyable way to pass the time with a few friends and is an excellent first product from a new company with an admirable mission. Paleo-wonks like myself will enjoy perusing the sizable deck (over 100 cards), which contains dozens of pithy quotes from the annals of American paleontology. Bryant Paul Johnson’s illustrations use a sepia-skewed pallette to reinforce the game’s veneer of Victorian stuffiness while the humorous imagery reminds you not to take it too seriously. And the gameplay serves as a delightfully skewed take on how a great deal of science has progressed over the past century or so—by competing egos conniving, posturing, and backstabbing their way towards a deeper understanding of our world.

Zygote Games also keeps a snappily written weblog, “Science Made Cool,” which has made its way onto my regular reading list.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Paleo-Pop.