by Dominic Crapuchettes

The Nature system currently has a BoardGameGeek rating of 8.6 – well beyond my wildest expectations! This designer diary tells the story of its most recent module, Nature: Climate.

The first five modules introduced entirely new material, but Nature: Climate takes a different approach: it’s a redesign of an Evolution expansion. I saved it for last because I knew it would be the most challenging module to create.

Evolution: Climate is widely regarded as the pinnacle of the Evolution series, so its successor was going to face intense scrutiny before it even shipped. It had big shoes to fill, and I was daunted by the challenge.

So I started with the people who know the game best: the players.

I reread every review, comment, and forum thread I could find, then surveyed nearly 500 Evolution: Climate fans with two simple questions: What should we never change? And what would you most like us to change?

The answers from that poll became my guiding principles.

What to Keep
Evolution: Climate is a highly thematic game, generating epic stories about how how life on Earth evolves over eons of time. That core concept was the sacred cow I could not tamper with.

Another aspect that stood out immediately is the extra trait slot. People loved the extra variety a fourth trait slot provided for their species, so Nature: Climate keeps it. And fans wanted more traits overall, so Nature: Climate doubles the number of the base game, making it the largest module yet. Since Nature allows duplicate traits, the number of possible species combinations grows far beyond a simple doubling.

What to Change
This 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 things are not always as they seem…

Looking closely at Evolution: Climate, we realized the problem wasn’t how far the climate moved. It was when the movement took place. You adapt your species first, then learn which way the climate moves. You could make the smartest possible decision and still get punished by a threat you couldn’t mitigate against.

So we flipped the sequence. In Nature: Climate, the climate moves first, then you adapt in response.

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.

The Climate Movement
Perfecting the climate movements took real work. One of my goals for the module was for it to tell a different story every time you play. I want players to think they’ve mastered the strategy, play again, and land in an entirely different ecosystem. One game might start in a temperate ecosystem and slowly slide into a blizzarding ice age. Another might spike into scorching heat immediately. Another might swing hard in one direction and then reverse course.

I would roll five times and plot the climate movement for a game, then do it again for 30 games
I have more than 20 tabs of systems I modeled by hand to see how the climate would move. Then I color coded the cells to help visualize the movement. It was a painstakingly stupid method.

Then Jared Cleary, one of the Nature playtesters, offered to model them in a statistical program. He could spit out 200,000 games in ten minutes!

Together, Jared and I 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, once every two million games, the climate will march straight into an Ice Age, and then march immediately back, ending the game in a Scorching Age. It might never happen, but if it does, it will become the kind of story your group still talks about for years.

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

The two extremes are also deliberately asymmetric to increase the number of different stories that get told.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.