The Stages of Nature: A Brief Preview and Interview with Designer Dominic Crapuchettes

Nature’s Path

Nature is the latest in an iterative series from designer and founder of NorthStar Game Studio, Dominic Crapuchettes. In the decade since the release of the highly popular Evolution, which has sold approximately 500,000 copies to date, Crapuchettes has toiled to create synergies and combinations likes those from one of his first passions, Magic: The Gathering.

“I was fascinated with the way a set of cards would synergize. I felt like I was discovering a world with limitless possibilities. I tried to share my excitement with several of my closest friends and loved ones, but the game was much too complicated for them,” begins Crapuchettes.   

“The Evolution series is my attempt to bring that excitement to a wider audience with a more accessible theme, more accessible rules, and without the endless money sink that comes with collectible card games. Each game in the series is my attempt to make the experience more accessible without losing the feeling of limitless possibilities.”

Image provided by the publisher

The More Nature Stays the Same...

“Game design is about finding a concept that's incredibly fun and making the barriers to that experience as low as possible,” explains Crapuchettes.

Nature has seemed to tap into that excitement and easy entry, with how the game is centered around card play that allows people to discard to play, to enrich, and to feed their growing herds. Similar to Evolution and Oceans, Nature provides quick turns of deciding how to grow your species, how best to meet the demands of that growth, and being prepared for the curveballs that come with its modular decks.

The core feeding mechanisms of Evolution and Oceans are present, but challenged and tweaked depending on how you leverage the decks. These decks can be mixed and matched with the base decks as well as other modular decks to ramp up difficulty, provide new alternatives toward evolving and engine building, and to just create chaos among players. It’s this balance that is central to Nature in our playthroughs of a prototype copy, and key to the game’s own growth.

“Nature is much easier to share with friends. The core game is relatively simple, but the modules change the experience in exciting ways.” Crapuchettes expands on this, “Each module provides a unique feeling. The Jurassic module makes you feel big and powerful. The Natural Disasters module makes you feel small and inconsequential. Mixing and matching these modules gives agency to the players, making them feel like they are designing a unique ecosystem to discover each time they play.”

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...The More Nature Changes

It's this combo of Crapuchettes' previous games that is at the heart of Nature. When asked why start anew with Nature, Crapuchettes has a plaintive and honest reaction. “Expansions were not the answer for Evolution, because the game was designed without planning for them. Consequently, both expansions are difficult to set up, and especially difficult when changing between the two. It was also impossible to make the expansions compatible while keeping the integrity of the game.”

Crapuchettes explains, “Nature takes the best of everything that I've worked on over the past decade. These are the three major issues that I've been working on for the past decade. These are hard issues to get right, but I think Nature does it: How to design an interactive game that feels gentle when you are targeted, how to design an engine builder that doesn't snowball, especially if you've been targeted, [and] how to design a modular system that is easy to setup, explain, and tear down.”

Likewise, Nature strikes an equal balance between the card battlers of Evolution as well as the unique engine building fun Oceans brought to the series. And the fun is just beginning. NorthStar plans to launch its crowdfunding with multiple modules, while also pledging to continue to support the game with 1-2 module releases per year. In fact, NorthStar has already announced that the Climate and Disease modules are tentatively set to be released in 2026.

Nature is available to back on Kickstarter right now.

Disclosure: This preview included a free prototype copy of the game for previewing purposes.