Dominant Species: Marine

Dominant Species: Marine is set up by choosing one of four animal types (crustaceans, fish, reptiles, or cephalopods) and placing the corresponding animal tokens on the game board. The board features hex tiles representing various ocean environments, and players receive a player board with their gene pool of cubes and special pawns. Elements like algae, plankton, and sun tokens are distributed on the action board and map tiles.

The main objective is to evolve your animal species and exert dominance over ocean tiles. Players compete to ensure their species adapt to changing environments, survive extinction events, and outmaneuver opponents across the board to gather the most victory points by the end of the game.

A player's turn consists of either placing one pawn on an available action space on the central board and immediately resolving its effect, or recovering all of their pawns. Actions allow players to manage resources, adapt traits, expand territory, trigger tectonic shifts, migrate, compete, evolve, or dominate habitats.

Victory points are scored throughout the game during specific phases such as evolution, expansion, competition, and domination. Players earn points based on the number of matching elements, successful species presence, and majority control over specific tile types and marine zones.

The game concludes when the asteroid card is drawn and revealed from the event deck. After resolving the asteroid and final survival events, players tally points from special pawns, remaining tiles, and majority controls. The player with the highest total victory points wins the game.