Katherine Hitchigs and Nick Bentley are intent on evolving.	Shades of Jurassic Park ...
Sceadeau D'Tela, Norwegian Haakon Monsen, Kara Felix and Rebecca Crites	GM Luke Warren and his four finalists determine the first Evolution champion.

The tournament exceeded all of my expectations for a first year event. We had 82 unique players taking part in 42 games. Many played in all four heats. Most exciting to me, players improved their play from one heat to the next. This led to some tight contests in the elimination rounds. Evolution is billed as a game that requires a different strategy to win every time you play, and subsequent rounds lived up to that billing.

Table 1 of the semis saw an early proliferation of species; at the end of Turn 2, there were 14! Joseph Kelleher alone had six at the end of Turn 3. Why no one created a carnivore in response to that is anyone’s guess. On Turn 5 Kevin Hammond created the only one in the game. As one would expect from a strategy of species proliferation, populations were low, but apparently not low enough, as five died from starvation on Turn 4. On the sixth and last turn, there were still 12 species on the board with 11 of them having two or less Population. Only Gordon “the Shark in Khakis” Stewart had one with four. With all of his species Joseph looked like the leader, but keeping them alive proved tricky. Kevin, aided by three Cooperations and the timely Turn 5 Carnivore, was able to keep the majority of his species alive in the low food environment and ended with Round 2’s most comfortable margin of victory.

Table 2 was tighter. Everyone slow played, matching each other in species and population. Despite the conservative play, no one wanted to give up too much food either, so there was starvation on Turn 3. Four species died on Turn 4. As a result, scores were low and the game lasted seven turns. Jennifer Visocnik created an unprotected Long Neck, Foraging, Cooperating species just to quickly grab three food points before being wiped out by carnivores. Amazingly, she was able to create the same creature again on the next and last turn. But while she snagged a lot of food points, putting all those resources into a vulnerable creature meant she did not protect her other creatures enough and her entire ecosystem was eaten. Despite extinction, she only missed the win by six points! John held his Trait Cards and waited to see how other creatures developed before deciding how to evolve his own. He only had one trait down over two species on Turn 2! The slow play worked, but barely. John had just enough defense to protect himself from Curt’s nasty Population 6, Climbing, Pack Hunting Carnivore, beating him by just one point! The spread of scores went from 38 to 44.

Table 3 saw hot action right out of the gate, with Michael Farrington creating a Pack Hunting Carnivore in the first round, a bold, idiosyncratic move that led to the quick proliferation of defensive traits. Round 2 saw the introduction of a second carnivore, this time by Sceadeau D’Tela. The critter soon became the only carnivore after eating Michael's. As expected, the early carnivores led to a surplus of plant food, so Sceadeau took advantage of the situation and turned his high-population carnivore into an herbivore midgame. Sceadeau looked strong, but Adam Oliner quietly created five species that could feed with Long Necks and Cooperations, thus allowing him to feed while starving out the competition. Sceadeau reacted by creating an Intelligent Carnivore in the last round to attack Adam. But he forgot Second Edition Hard Shells are better than First Edition, and he was not able to make a critical attack against one of Adam’s critters. After the game was over there was some debate over whether a successful attack would have actually been enough for Sceadeau to win. No consensus was reached. Adam’s 63 points beat Sceadeau by a mere two points. Lawrence Solomon came in a close third with 59.

Table 4 featured an insurgent underdog, Keith Abel, who was an alternate admitted in place of a missing qualifier. In the early going, it looked like Keith was going to run away with the game. In Round 1, he created two Long Neck critters and by Round 2 one of them had become Fertile and Foraging. The creature proliferated and consumed plant food at an astonishing rate. Since there was a ton of food in the watering hole for the first half of the game, Keith's creature went wild with fertility, and soon he had a second Fertile creature to boot. But then, shortly after the midpoint, Josh Tempkin introduced the first carnivore. Keith's creatures could eat and reproduce quickly but not defend very well; Josh's carnivore drove two to extinction.

In the meantime, Pete had been slowly accumulating species and traits and by the time Keith's species started going extinct, Pete had four species. No other player had more than three. Moreover, they could also eat a ton (having three Long Necks, two Cooperations, Foraging, and Fat Tissue between them), AND they were well defended against Josh's carnivore.

Pete even managed to add a fifth species, a fat forager, in the last round. At this point it looked like a Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest over in Pete's ecosystem; no one could keep up. Pete won with a seven-point margin over Keith. No one else was close.

All of the top seeds lost in the semifinals while all the second seeds advanced! Nevertheless, the play in the Final remained strong. Adam Olinger created the rare first turn Carnivore (with Fat Tissue!), wiping out one of John and Keith’s species. This kept the number of species in check and gave Adam a food point advantage while forcing the other players to play conservatively. But this left Pete with two species at the end of Turn 1, and that ultimately proved Adam’s downfall. Combined with Adam ditching the Carnivore trait on Turn 3, which would have held Pete in check, and Pete returning the carnivore favor to Adam on Turn 3 by wiping out one of his species, Pete took the lead and never looked back. He turned his attention to John, his closest competitor, on the last turn. He ditched his Ambush trait for Intelligence, which allowed him to avoid John’s Horns defense on his Cooperation, Scavenger critter, costing him four points. But with 12 guaranteed Trait Card points for the end of the game, there was no way they could catch up. Pete scored 75 points to take his first WBC title and John finished a distant second with 59.