simple earth 2025

Welcome to simple earth, with its magic colour-changing board, now yours to print, build and enjoy... or even sell!

As sea levels rise and fall, and mass extinction looms, bugs mutate and fight. Will yours grow big and risk being wiped out? Or stay small and try to evade their opponents? The choices are yours, but life on simple earth is rarely predictable, so even a novice will occasionally triumph. With up to four players and an increasingly crowded planet, the aim is to make all other bugs extinct. However, extinct players can still affect the outcome, and even score tournament points, by playing on as ‘ghosts’!

Perhaps best described as a sort of ‘gambler’s chess’, simple earth is a mixture of positional strategy and dice-based risk taking. The changing sea level adds a further element of chance, and further choices, as smaller spaces magically change colour, connecting some, whilst isolating others (spoiler alert – it’s not really magic!)

Rooted firmly in evolution and designed, in part, to challenge the conventions of traditional strategy games (hierarchy, black vs. white, etc.), simple earth hopes to foster an appreciation of diversity, if not for its own sake, then at least as a way of mitigating risk.

—description from the designer