Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
A huge meteor containing some form of extra-terrestrial life crashes to Earth somewhere in the icy wasteland of Antarctica. The American government sets up a secret facility whose goal is to contain and examine these new and unfamiliar lifeforms — but something goes wrong.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Area Majority
Compete to have the strongest presence in areas that award control or points.
Dice Rolling
Roll dice to introduce uncertainty into actions, production, movement, or resolution.
Modular Board
Build the play area from interchangeable sections that vary between games.
Variable Player Powers
Each player has different abilities, restrictions, or strategic advantages.
Hexagon Grid
Use a hexagonal map where each space connects evenly in six directions.
Read the full game description
A huge meteor containing some form of extra-terrestrial life crashes to Earth somewhere in the icy wasteland of Antarctica. The American government sets up a secret facility whose goal is to contain and examine these new and unfamiliar lifeforms — but something goes wrong. A huge storm damages the station, destroying vital systems. The alien microbes escape and begin to spread and conflict with each other, while the station's human inhabitants rapidly succumb to the cold. The last survivor, afraid of what the microbes could do to humanity, initiates a self-destruction procedure. There are four minutes left... Chromosome is an asymmetrical, tactical board game for 2-4 players. As an alien microbe, unaware of your impending doom, you struggle to survive and to escape the laboratory. As one of four microbe species, you have four general and four unique actions to take during your turn. You use them to spawn your microbe, fight other microbes, manipulate energy, create radioactive spaces, and finally mutate – to get new genes (four different types) that will help you to fight better, grow faster, and overcome your opponents. Your goal is to create the most effective set of genes to thrive in an environment that might be different each time you play. You win the game and escape the station if you have more population tokens on the board and more enemy microbes destroyed than any other player.