Kevin Nunn wrote about Game Currencies and gave us a definition of currency applicable to game design.
“something that players spend in the game to exchange for something else in the game.”
I’m designing a board game about Proterozoic organisms evolving in a primordial soup (think: the Cell Stage of Spore) and I’m pondering the sorts of currencies one might find in an economy of evolution.
Here are a couple of possibilities:
- Population.
- When an organism flourishes within its niche, it accumulates population.
- Population can be spent to spread territorial range.
- Change.
- When an organism meets adversity and fails, it accumulates change.
- Change can be spent to mutate and evolve.
What currencies would you expect to find in an evolutionary Ursuppe? I asked that question on Twitter and got some good replies.
play without fear 
The original Ursuppe used poop cubes as food and biological points as currency, but your income was basically fixed (with a couple small exceptions).
One thing you could do is make areas of the board more hazardous/stressful for organisms, but also more lucrative in terms of evolutionary advance encouragement/adversity, maybe a la the turn-by-turn race bonuses in Battle Merchants.
Another thing that occurs to me is to steal the Eclipse victory point draw mechanism, so everyone wants to get a little evolved but increased stress has diminishing returns.
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Yes, that’s exactly what I plan to do with the board. There are areas which have different environmental challenges and when you encounter those it can lead to change.
I don’t recall the Eclipse vp draw mechanism – can you refresh me?
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