So Random: Board Game Biomos Relies Too Much on Luck

Biomos is a small-box filler game with a puzzly aspect where you’re trying to build your planet’s ecosystem with marbles that represent different terrain types. It’s quick to learn and solid for family play but ultimately has too much randomness in it to be more than that.

Your player board in Biomos has a curved track into which you’ll place the marbles you draw over the course of each game. At the start of each round, you draw five random terrain marbles from the bag to set up the supply, regardless of the player count. The start player for the round takes one marble and places it into the track on their personal board, at either end of their current line of marbles or even somewhere in the middle of the line. They may then claim an objective card if they match the pattern shown, gaining anywhere from two to 10 victory points.

The exception to these rules is the Moon action, which each player may use once per game. Instead of placing the chosen terrain marble on your track, you can place it in the empty Moon space on your board. You’ll get three bonus points at game end for every marble in your track that matches the color of the one you placed in the Moon space. When taking this action, you may also remove one marble from your board and place it somewhere else along the track, which is the only time you can move a marble you’ve already placed.

The objective cards provide the bulk of the points in the game, and they come in two flavors. At the start of each game, you draw four Giant Biome cards from the deck of 10 and lay them out on the table; they’re worth 10 points each and require that you place four marbles of the same color in a certain pattern. Once one player validates one of these Giant Biome cards, they take it and it isn’t replaced—the four that you get to start the game are all you get. You also start the game with four Basic Biome cards that are easier to complete and worth two to seven points; these cards are replaced whenever a player takes one. You can only validate one Biome card per turn, even if you can complete several of them, which also means that you can’t validate the one drawn to replace the one you just completed.

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The game ends once all players have filled the tracks and the Moon spaces on their boards, which will happen in the same round. Final scores are just the sum of the values of completed Biome cards plus the Moon token bonus, so it’s also easy to see how scores are progressing as you play.

Biomos is incredibly simple to learn and teach, and you can definitely play this with younger kids. The random nature of the card and token draws limits how much you can plan ahead, however, and if you plan for a specific Giant Biome card but someone else takes it first, you’re almost completely out of the running—you would need to get very lucky with the Basic Biome cards to make up the lost ground. The game comes with an advanced mode that adds two spaces to your track, with the rule that you can never move the tokens in those spots, and that also adds “planetary powers” you can use once per turn to further manipulate your biome track, but none of this really gets at the core randomness issue.

The physical design and components of Biomos are solid; the tracks are sturdy and the boards and cards are bright and eye-catching. Each marble color has a unique pattern that should make the game accessible to players who have difficulty distinguishing colors, and the game is entirely language-independent. That high luck factor might make it much better for playing with younger kids, though, as I don’t think it’s good enough to be a filler at your adult game night.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.