Exquisite Biome

O monstrous form, by what hand is thy nature wrought?

One of my favorite little intellectual exercises, and a wondrous exploration of potential ecological niches. Great for enlivening an ongoing campaign's world.

hi there, just wondering if any community copies would be released into the wild before Christmas 

It’s a tough month for me without family and I’m after some good games to help cope with the holiday period. Kind regards

Having a great time doing small sessions of this!  In a way it's quite minimalistic, but it also does a lot with its simple structure and excellent prompts. The layout is beautiful and works great on my e-ink. I love that alternate modes were included as well. Will for sure play more.

I had a great time playing this solo, definitely want to bring it to a group sometime!

I have yet to play this game, but I must mention how incredible Caro is: I reached out for an educator's discount for a few of their games after reading about them (I run an after-school TTRPG group for some students). Instead of a discount, they sent me free copies of two separate games. Considering how much hard work has gone into these games, I am incredibly grateful for their generosity. This is why I love independent creators and the community to which they've contributed. Thank you Caro!

This looks incredible! Is there a chance you can add one formatted for print so I can print this at a local print shop? Thanks!!

Absolutely love this game, thoroughly recommend.

I found this on Dicebreaker and don't have the money now to buy it, but I would delight in leaving a review for a Community Copy!

This is really fun! I had a blast creating weird creatures.

I'd love to know if/when more community copies come out! This looks so awesome but I sadly can't spend the money right now

I am an educator and would be interested in trying this out with my kiddos. I’m hoping for community copies; I’ll be thrilled to do a review after trying out the game. Thanks!

I played with my sister and we had so much fun creating absolute monstrosities

Just played this with two friends and it was such a lot of fun! Fun premise, evocative prompts and welcoming presentation. I really enjoyed discovering the animals and their ecosystem together.

Exquisite Biome is a quick, fun way to create a little world with weird critters that you'll fall in love with. The cardplay element is so smart, and creates an endless amount of creatures to live in your world should you choose to keep drawing/cycling cards. The idea of playing this with a group to create the best creature sounds like a blast, I can't wait to try it with friends!

So cool!!! I had a lot of fun playing and making up wacky creatures and their habits :D

There will be more community copies? Actually I cant afford

Tried this out with some friends and made some extremely funky beasties living in a cloud forest. Our scenes after creature discovery were staged like we were researchers out in these woods, finding these creatures for the first time. We narrated our potential process for having found these animals, describing their striking and odd features, and speculating upon the function of said structures and the scenes we observed that would eventually help us fully understand their ecology.

We firstly ended up with the Humphrish, a pollinating fish with long, nectar-licking mouthparts which resembled the brightly-colored inflorescences on a bromeliad, which was where the females of the species would live. Sequential hermaphroditism would occur when males (responsible for guarding the eggs dropped from the treetops by the female, and normally found in the leaf litter at the foot of trees hosting these bromeliads) would climb the tree and attempt to oust the female.

Predating upon these fish was a small, mantis-like insect that would bioluminesce in a way that resembled the female humphrish's mouthparts, and trick males into climbing up the trees to it. Per our scenes, it initially escaped our notice because it wouldn't activate its bioluminescence when we were out in the woods at night with torches!

Finally, the apex predator of this ecosystem was the "sharpcat". We had to take some liberties with card interpretation for this one, as we ended up with the King of Spades (sedentary, very large groups) for its third card. We decided that this microraptor (with clawed wings, winged legs, and a stiff tail ending in an additional hook which acted as a rudimentary fifth limb) was the wild, ancestral species that was domesticated into this world's people's equivalent of our domestic house cats. While technically an active hunter and solitary in the wild, their domesticated descendants are generally more placid and live in high densities within households in urban areas.

An all-round excellent game and one I'm keen to return to, both with friends and as a solo adventure.

Leaving my review public here as well

While this can be roleplayed, you can use this exclusively as a creative exercise in a debate style and it also works wonderfully.

One of the most interesting and innovative designs I've seen in a while and my new go to way of populating a new biome in an RPG campaign with the help of the players, absolutely recomended!

Leaving my review public in the comments, because I truly love this game and hope this encourages someone who was on the fence about buying it to do it, because it's so worth it.

I play worldbuilding games with one of my friends on semi regular basis and, after our session of Exquisite Biome ended (which it did but a couple minutes before I started writing this comment), we both agreed this is one of the best sessions we've had so far. The prompts are the highlight here, every time they inspired something we would have never thought of ourselves and drastically changed not only our entire idea of the creature but the entire ecosystem (ex. a transparent flyer squid-like creature turned out to have captivating eyes, which we then decided bear a resemblence to fruits that are common in the area, which completely transformed them into ambush predators and came up in nearly every scene afterwards). They also almost always lead us to follow up questions, which even further developed the world in interesting ways. The freeform structure of the game never stopped us from these tangential discussions about proprioception, blood color and whatnot, which I really appreciate. It never felt like anything here ever tied us down, we were free to go as wild as we wanted and provided all the tools to do so, which I think is the best approach in this kind of games. The whole thing is also decorated with this stellar artwork (with a really interesting and pretty color palette), which, aside from just being very nice to look at, also serves to inspire many ideas. 

Overall, one of my favorite worldbuilding games so far. I will certainly come back to it, not only with my friend to continue further building this ecosystem, but also with other people.

Incredible game, playable as a solo or as a group. The biologist in me can't wait to play it, everything seems grounded and realistic, while still giving you an incredible diversity.

Buy it, you won't regret this.

Also, I'm looking for games to translate in french, and I'd love to make this one available for my french solo RPG community. Could we discuss this maybe?

I just played this for the first time solo this afternoon (i did a little live play thread on twitter as i went). Beautiful and concise game, that I think would be even more fun to play with friends, or experiment with structure. I had a lot of fun and felt very inspired as a science fiction writer who really enjoys xenobiology in world building but rarely gets a chance to play around with it. the layout and illustations are also extremely beautiful (well done SiFSweetman!) and i'm glad this was being posted about on cohost so i remembered to check it out! looking forward to either using this for story prompts, or as a worldbuilding game with friends

update: here is a better consolidated and organized collection of my 3 creatures from my solo game. this also includes further expanded upon descriptions of their appearances!