Latest news with #floraFauna
CNA
3 days ago
- General
- CNA
Singapore's Southern Islands are home to plants and animals not found anywhere else in the country, survey finds
A biodiversity survey has found that Singapore's Southern Islands are home to many plant and animal species not found anywhere else in the country. The survey – the first comprehensive study of its kind conducted on the islands – recorded more than 6,500 types of flora and fauna, including 44 new native species.
Geek Dad
3 days ago
- Business
- Geek Dad
Kickstarter Tabletop Alert: ‘Rewild: South America'
Build biomes and populate them with flora and fauna to rewind a damaged landscape. What Is Rewild: South America? Rewild: South America is a tile-laying, tableau-building game for 1 to 4 players, ages 10 and up, and takes about 45–60 minutes to play. It's currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of 60 Swiss Francs (about $73USD) for a copy of the game. It involves building out a landscape, and then finding synergies between the various plants and animals that can be placed on the landscape. Rewild: South America was designed by Bruno Liguori Sia and published by Treeceratops, with illustrations by Keen Art, Joey Pool, and Johanna Tarkela. New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer. Rewild: South America components. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu Rewild: South America Components Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, so it is subject to change and may not reflect final component quality. Here's what comes in the box: Score board 4 Player boards 75 Biome tiles (shrublands, shrubland extensions, grasslands, rainforests) 55 Wildlife cards 26 Predation cards 28 Plant cards 28 Player Action cards 25 Expert Mode cards 4 Overview cards 11 Branch Animal meeples 18 Expert Mode Animal meeples 16 Player markers (4 per player) Start Player meeple 95 Animal markers (paw prints) 35 Minerals 35 Water 35 Seeds One of the first things about Rewild that caught my eye was the illustration style: the animals are done in a cartoon style with sharp outlines, set against backgrounds that have a softer look, giving it a Studio Ghibli vibe. With the recent proliferation of AI-generated images and videos using a similar style, I'm pleased to note that Treeceratops did not use any AI imagery in this game—these images are made by actual people. The illustrations of the various insects and animals that you'll be able to attract to your landscape are all beautifully illustrated, and the style helps the creatures really stand out on the cards. A selection of animal cards showing one of each category: insect, 3 sizes of herbivore, and 2 sizes of carnivore. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu There are several animal categories in the animal and predation decks, each with its own icon: insect, herbivore (small, medium, and large), predators, and apex predators—all but the insects are represented by an animal face icon. My only complaint with the icons is that the small herbivore icon and the predator icon are a similar size and profile, so it can be easy to mix them up at a glance. Treeceratops is a Swiss company with a focus on sustainability, and as such aims to limit the amount of plastic they use, and they also rely on FSC-certified or recycled materials when possible. The wooden tokens in the game come in paper envelopes rather than plastic bags, and all of the game components are cardboard, paper, and wood. The scoreboard is a large board that includes a scoring track around the outside edge, and then has clearly marked spaces for the three types of cards. My only complaint is that because you're constantly taking cards from the board, and then sliding cards to the right to refill, it can be quite easy to bump the scoring tokens out of place. Player board with some terrain tiles and cards added to the biomes. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu The player boards are square, filled with hexes, some with additional icons in them. Along the right side of the board there are some icons indicating the three biomes where you will place cards, as well as a reminder for what's needed to complete a biome. There's a regular side and an advanced side—they're mostly the same except for the completed biome bonus. Animal meeples for the advanced game. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu There's a variety of animal meeples, and it's a shame that the bulk of them are only used in the advanced game, because they're very cool. I suppose it's an incentive to play the game enough to move to the advanced mode! These animals can live in the trees! (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu The meeples that are used in every game are the ones sitting on (or hanging from) branches. These have a small rectangular base, which slots into the top of the 3D cardboard trees. It's a clever design, and it's a lot of fun when you manage to make that happen during the game. How to Play Rewild: South America You can download a copy of the rulebook here. The Goal The goal of the game is to score the most points by building out your landscape and filling it with plants and animals. 2-player setup. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu Setup Give each player a player board, four player markers, and 7 action cards of their player color. Place one player marker Everyone also starts with 4 minerals, 4 water, and 1 seed. The player who most recently saw a wild animal takes the start player token. Set up the main board: shuffle each of the card decks separately, and place them on their indicated spaces, and then reveal cards to form the market (5 animals, 3 predation cards, and 3 plants). Place the rest of the components—animal markers, landscape tiles, trees, resources, and animal meeples—nearby as a supply. Gameplay On your turn, you must play an action card from your hand and use its effect; each card has 2 options except for the harvest card. Once you've played your action, you leave the card in front of you, turned so that the action you took is at the top—the landscape icons above the actions may be used for various effects during the game. Each player gets a set of these 7 action cards. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu Six of the cards have an option to add a specific landscape tile to your board, which costs minerals and water. Some of the hex spaces on your board show minerals or water—these are discounts for tiles placed on those locations. In addition, each shrubland provides a 1-mineral discount for tiles placed adjacent to it, and each grassland provides a 1-water discount. (Grasslands can be upgraded to wetlands, which provide a 2-water discount.) If you place a landscape tile on a star icon, you score points immediately, with rainforests scoring the most points and shrublands scoring the fewest. There are also actions that allow you to gain minerals, water, or seeds—each of these also discards a specific card from the market. Finally, there are actions that upgrade landscapes: Shrublands can be expanded by adding a single hex shrubland, grasslands are flipped over to the wetlands side, and rainforests gain a tree. (Each landscape can only be upgraded once.) The harvest card gives you 1 water, plus a number of seeds based on the landscape tiles on your board. Finally, it allows you to take all of your action cards back (including itself). After playing and resolving your action card, if it was not the harvest card, you may then attract a number of cards from the score board: up to 5 wildlife card, 1 predation card, and 1 plant card. The Gray Brocket takes up 4 hexes of shrubland or 3 hexes of grasslands, but cannot live in the rainforest or in a tree. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu Wildlife cards have an icon showing which landscape types the animal can live on, and how many hexes they occupy. If you have sufficient space in one of the terrain types, you may take the card and place it to the right of your board in the corresponding biome, and then place animal markers (the paw prints) in the hexes. Each hex on your board can only have one animal marker in it. Some animals can live in rainforests or trees—if so, then you find the matching meeple and use that instead. If you already have a tree, or if you upgrade the rainforest tile later to add a tree, then you can put the meeple into the tree, which frees up the rainforest ground space for another animal and also scores you 4 points. Predation cards also have icons showing which biome they belong to, but they also need specific types of prey in that biome. When played, you place the predation card on top of the prey animal, and score points immediately. (Note that this does not remove the animal markers from the board.) Plant cards cost seeds and have a variety of effects. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu Plant cards have a seed cost and show which biome they belong to—just pay the cost and place the card to the right of your board in that biome. Many cards have either a lightning bolt effect or an hourglass effect. Lightning bolt effects are immediate—usually scoring, but sometimes gaining resources. Hourglass effects are end-of-game scoring effects. If a card gets covered by a predation card, then it loses its effects and is mostly ignored except for effects that specifically refer to eaten animals. My forest biome has been completed and scores six points. (The insect has been covered by a predator.) (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu You can complete a biome if it has at least one plant, one insect, one herbivore (any size), and one predator (either size). These count even if they have been eaten. The completed biome scores 6 points, and then you mark the completion bonus on your board with a player marker as a reminder that you've already scored it. Game End The game end is triggered if any of the following happens: A player has 8 visible (not eaten) animal cards showing A player has completely filled their board with landscape tiles The last wildlife card has been placed on the board. When this happens, complete the current round, and then play one more full round. All players then score any of their visible end-of-game scoring effects. The player with the highest score wins, with ties going to the player with the most completed biomes, and then the highest sum of rainforest tiles plus trees. Game Variants The solo game is run like a 2-player game, with an automated player. The automated player uses a set of action cards and a sort of flowchart that determines where it places tiles, which animals it will try to attract, and so on. Since it's a simplified bot that doesn't really have a way to react to what you're doing, it gets a score handicap of 1.5x (or 2x if you're playing on hard mode). The advanced game introduces the rest of the animal meeples and some new wildlife cards that get shuffled into their corresponding decks. The advanced animals have, in addition to the regular icons indicating the required landscape, an additional icon showing a particular terrain layout. If you can build that particular layout on your board, then you get the advanced animal meeple and bonus points. Two animals have found homes in the treetops. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu Why You Should Play Rewild: South America Rewild: South America combines the tile-laying and a card tableau in an interesting way. The bulk of your points come from the cards—most of the animals offer either immediate scoring or end-game scoring, and a few of the plants also score points. But in order to play those cards, you'll need to build out the tiles on your board to create the space for them, and that creates a different sort of puzzle about using the hex spaces efficiently, particularly taking advantage of the bonus icons. I like the way that it feels like you're building an ecosystem layer by layer. First it's the landscape itself: shrublands, grasslands, or rainforest. Then, once you have enough space, it attracts insects and herbivores, which in turn can attract carnivores. Since the game ends when you have 8 animals showing (or 9 in the advanced game), you can't just expand indiscriminately if you want a good score. I've sometimes taken the first animal that fits in a landscape spot, but then covered it later with a carnivore. If that first animal had an end-game score on it, I've just forfeited those points—better to take an animal with an immediate scoring bonus if you're planning to eat it later, because then you've already gotten the points. If you're not attracting predators, then you have a limited number of available spaces to place cards before the game ends, so you really want good combinations. There's a wide variety of end-game scoring conditions: you might score points for each medium-sized herbivore, or each tree, or each insect. There are also many animals that will give you points for landscape icons, which appear on the landscape tiles, on certain plant cards, and even on your action cards. For those, the timing of your action cards becomes important. For instance, if you'll score 1 point per shrubland icon, then not only do you want to maximize your shrublands (perhaps by upgrading them), you could get as many as 6 more shrubland icons from your action cards, but only if you take the correct actions and the cards are still out when the game ends. If you play them too early, you might end up taking a harvest action and putting them back in your hand. Wait too late, and the game might end before you've played them again. Each card is gorgeously illustrated. (Prototype shown) Photo: Jonathan H. Liu I mentioned the puzzle of building out your landscape tiles. There are bonus spaces on the board that can reduce the mineral or water cost of a tile, so you can use those to get some things built out quickly without having to spend actions to collect resources—for instance, you could use the 2-mineral discount to build a rainforest, since those provide more seeds when you harvest. However, there are only so many of the discount spaces, and rainforests do not provide resources for neighboring tiles. Shrublands and grasslands provide minerals and water, so if you build those up first, you can set up spaces that will be cheaper to build in the future. Having a good idea of how you want to lay things out will help you ensure that you'll have the right amount of space to play everything you need. Some of the spaces on your board have stars, which give points when you play a landscape tile on them, but you get more points for placing a rainforest than shrubland. The first time I played, I avoided building on them, thinking that I'd get around to placing forests on each one to maximize my score … but then ran out of time and ended up with several of them left empty by the end of the game. It's a tricky balance, deciding when it's time to cash in on the bonus points and when you can wait a little longer to build up to a rainforest. While there isn't any direct player interaction—you can't do anything to somebody else's board or tableau—you can try to scoop up plants or wildlife that are particularly advantageous to your opponents. For instance, in one game where I had a carnivore-heavy tableau, my opponent snagged the vulture, which awards points for each eaten animal. It wasn't worth as many points to him, but preventing me from getting it probably won him the game. Your action cards that claim resources also discard cards from the market; it's the rightmost card, so you don't get to choose just any card, but at the right time you could use it to dump a card before somebody else gets it. Rewild: South America has bits and pieces that remind me of some other games, but as a whole it's a new experience. You're managing both your action economy and your resources, and you're looking for things that will round out each of your biomes. I like both the board-based puzzle of the landscapes and the combo-building puzzle of the wildlife cards. And it doesn't hurt that the illustrations are so eye-catching! For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Rewild: South America Kickstarter page! Click here to see all our tabletop game reviews. To subscribe to GeekDad's tabletop gaming coverage, please copy this link and add it to your RSS reader. Disclosure: GeekDad received a prototype of this game for review purposes. Liked it? 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Geek Dad
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Dad
Stack Overflow: Alien Intelligence
We've named ourselves Homo sapiens because what sets us apart—according to ourselves—is the way that we think. We are knowledgeable, wise, sentient in a way that other creatures are not… aren't we? What happens when we encounter minds that are quite different from our own? Today's stack includes a few stories of people encountering alien intelligences. Semiosis , Interference , and Usurpation by Sue Burke I mentioned the first book in this trilogy, Semiosis , back in April when I was about halfway through. I've since caught up on the next two books in the series and I've really enjoyed the whole trilogy. It'll be hard to talk about the whole trilogy without some spoilers for the first two books, though I think I can communicate at least some of it in broad enough strokes. The overarching theme is sentience, and each book has its own tagline: 'Sentience takes many forms.' 'Sentience craves sovereignty.' 'Sentience will prevail.' The exploration of different forms of sentience is fascinating and Burke does a great job of conveying them convincingly. Semiosis centers on a small human colony on a planet they've dubbed Pax. They've left Earth behind literally and are also attempting to do so figuratively, though it's hard to escape your own culture even if you mean well. On Pax, they encounter many different flora and fauna, and eventually discover that the plants on this planet are sentient. They are able to communicate to each other through chemicals passed along via roots, through pollen carried by the wind, and more. One plant, a rainbow bamboo, is particularly intelligent and becomes central to the story, which unfolds over the course of a few human generations, by the end of which the bamboo has become a full-fledged member of their community. (There are also the Glassmakers, some other sentient aliens they eventually encounter and integrate into the community as well, though not without some initial conflicts.) Interference takes place a couple hundred years later. Things have been in turmoil on Earth—for one, Earth is at war with the Mars colony. A ship has been sent to Pax to see what has happened to the colony; they lost radio contact but Earth has evidence that the colony survived. By now, the Pacifists (as the colonists are known) and the Earthlings have diverged a bit in culture as well as language. The technology available on Pax—which has very limited metal—is still fairly primitive, whereas the Earthlings all have embedded chips that basically allow them network access. As with the first book, the story is told from the point of view of various characters throughout: Earthlings, Pacifists (both human and Glassmaker), and even the rainbow bamboo. The Earthlings fundamentally misunderstand what's going on at the colony; they think the Glassmakers are just trained animals and not intelligent beings, and they don't understand the significance of the bamboo—though that's because the Pacifists have agreed to keep its intelligence a secret. There's also conflict within the ranks of the Earthlings, who disagree on the purposes of this trip and how things should be handled. Usurpation takes place back on Earth again, nearly 400 years later, enough time that the visitors to Pax had returned, bringing with them seeds of the rainbow bamboo as well as some of the small fauna. (And there are also other alien flora and fauna from other planets now as well.) Pax and Earth have now been back in radio contact, sending messages back and forth, though the distance means that it takes about 55 years for a message to be received. The bamboo has propagated and there are many groves around the world, celebrated for its colorful appearance and the caffeinated fruit that it produces, but it has kept its intelligence a secret, known only to the former director of the Pax Institute who discovered it on the trip to Pax. Levanter, one of the initial bamboo groves at the Institute, has been its director for nearly a century, pretending to be human, but politics and warfare bring unexpected visitors. In the last book, we encounter yet another type of intelligence: robots. Robots are everywhere, created by humans to perform various tasks. Sometimes robots are disconnected from the networks and become wild, wandering off with purposes unknown to the humans. The interactions between humans, the bamboo, and the robots during an ongoing war is the bulk of the story—particularly when Levanter receives a message from the Pax bamboo that the bamboo is supposed to command and protect humans. Although all three books let different voices speak, the structure of the books varies a little from book to book. Interference has fewer, longer chapters all narrated by a single voice. One, voiced by the bamboo, is about 100 pages on its own. Usurpation also has long chapters, but often will include several different voices, or switch between voices mid-chapter. It did take me a little bit longer to get into Usurpation because the opening chapter didn't really include the plants at all until later, though I trusted that Burke knew where she was taking me, and it paid off. Burke explains in the afterword that these books were inspired by her mother's love of houseplants, and the question: What if plants could think? Scientists have begun to find ways that plants sense and react to things, a primitive sort of cognition. Burke took that further and created a planet dominated by plants. The story takes place over such a long span of time because 'plants generally react slowly'—but their permanence also affects their personality in the story. As they see it, animals can move, so running away is always an option. We can provoke conflict because if things get bad we can flee—but plants have to figure out how to solve problems in a different way because they're stuck in place. At the bookstore today, I happened to see a book called Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity by Robert N. Spengler. I haven't actually read the book, but the brief summary is about the way that the domestication of crop plants could be seen as plants exploiting humans rather than the other way around. In the Semiosis trilogy, we get to see the plant's perspective, and it is given intelligence so that this co-evolution happened with intent; the plant considers how to train animals—including humans—to help it with its own objectives. Anyway, if you like the idea of plants that can think and communicate, you'd enjoy this intriguing trilogy. Suitor Armor Volume Two by Purpah I shared about the first volume of Suitor Armor in my 'Artificial Intelligence' column last fall. This is a webcomic-turned-hardcover, and the intelligence in question is a magically animated suit of armor. The court mage Norrix created the armor to serve as the king's champion, and as far as he's concerned it's just a dumb machine that follows orders. But Lucia, a fairy (disguised as a human) who has also begun a mage apprenticeship with Norrix, has had more interactions with the armor—now named Modeus—and realizes that not only does he think, but he can also speak, and definitely has feelings … or is at least trying to understand them. Unfortunately, since humans and fairies are at war, Lucia has always had to hide her true nature. When she learns that Modeus' purpose involves killing fairies, she wonders what will happen if he finds out who she really is? And what does Modeus really understand about the world? This volume feels a little more high stakes than the first, with a lot more tension as secrets start to be revealed. Tongues Volume 1 by Anders Nilsen Prometheus lies chained to a mountainside, having a conversation with his only consistent visitor, the eagle who arrives daily to eat his liver. A young American wanders across a desolate landscape, talking to a teddy bear on his backpack, and gets picked up by some soldiers driving past in a Humvee. Followers of a mysterious figure named Z, or perhaps Omega, are kidnapping children to train as soldiers. Astrid, an African orphan, has been recruited for a mission by a god only she can see. Anders Nilsen deftly weaves together these odd threads, creating a story that mixes ancient myths with modern-day tensions. The gods—who appear in unusual forms here—have powers that defy human understanding and a historical conflict that long outdates the current human war, but there are also connections that link them. In a flashback, we see Prometheus and Epimetheus observing early humanity as they acquire language—in this case, humans themselves are the alien intelligence, and their development of language even influences the way the gods communicate with each other. Astrid has been told she is special, that she has a special role to play in the upcoming battle … though the messengers are unsure. Perhaps she is nobody. I've only read one other book by Nilsen: Big Questions , which I picked up used at a bookstore years ago. I was struck first by the sheer size of the book, but also by the fine details of the illustrations. Tongues isn't as long as Big Questions but it's still a hefty book, at nearly 370 pages. It's a big hardcover that I mostly read sitting at a table because it's a bit heavy for holding in my lap in a cozy chair. Nilsen's page layouts rarely use a traditional grid pattern, instead combining polygons to form strange crystalline structures filled with drawings, giving it a three-dimensional look. There are a few pages with flaps that fold out, revealing surprises underneath. There are parts of the story that include some body horror, some grotesque violence, illustrated with the same precision and detail as everything else. Tongues is an amazing book that digs into some big themes about the nature of humanity. Prometheus is asked if he regrets what he did, the sin that led to his eternal torture. Presented with what humans are like now, what they've managed to do with his gift, would he have made a different decision? I had somehow glossed over that this was a Volume 1 when I started reading it, but it closes with a few scenes that hint of crucial decisions yet to be made. I don't know how long it will take for Volume 2 since it's such a lengthy book, but it's definitely on my reading list. Disclosure: Affiliate links to help support my writing and independent booksellers! I received review copies of the books included in this column. Liked it? Take a second to support GeekDad and GeekMom on Patreon!
