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SolidSymbiosis Review
7/ 10- Played 17 times on this shelf
- 2–4 players · best at 3
- 10–20 min
- Light
Symbiosis came into my life the way more games do than I would like to admit. I was scrolling BoardGameGeek, half reading a thread about something else entirely, and an ad for it sat there with a little frog on the box and the promise of a game that plays in ten to twenty minutes. I own enough games that I should be immune to that kind of thing by now. I am not immune. I clicked, and not long after that, Symbiosis was on my table.
The game comes from Jérémy and Christelle Partinico, and the idea at the center of it is lovely in a quiet way. Each player builds a small pond out of cards, a grid of animals and colors and seasons, and every card scores according to where it sits. A card on the left side of your pond looks across at your left neighbor's pond to decide what it is worth. A card on the right looks to your right neighbor. Only the middle of your pond cares about you alone. Your score is always partly on loan from the people sitting beside you, which is about as honest a reading of the word symbiosis as I have seen a designer commit to cardboard.
My first play was a two-player game, and I really liked it. At two, the game fills the empty seat with a river of cards in the middle of the table, and that river stands in as your other neighbor for scoring. It felt clean. I could see the whole state of things without much effort, I could usually read what my opponent was reaching for, and the river was predictable in the way only something without desires can be. The game moved quickly and I won, which I am sure colored my affection for it a little. Winning a short game has a way of convincing you that you understand it.
Then we played at three.
I have now played Symbiosis twice at three players and lost both games, and I suspect those two losses taught me more than the win did. The rules barely shift, yet the game felt like a different creature. My left neighbor and my right neighbor were two different people with two different ponds and two different plans, and every card I placed on either edge of my grid became a small wager on what one of them would do next. The river had never wanted anything. These two wanted plenty, and what they wanted pulled in different directions, and there I was in the middle trying to score off both of them at once.
The Stoic Hierocles pictured each of us standing at the center of a set of circles, the self first, then family, then neighbors, then the city, and out from there to all of humanity. The work of a good life, as he saw it, was drawing those outer circles in closer. I keep thinking about him when I look at my pond, because Symbiosis builds his circles right into the scoring. I can tend my center all I like and it will only get me so far. The edges of my pond belong partly to the people next to me, and whatever I put there only means something in relation to them. Martin Buber wrote that in the beginning is the relation, and that line has been rattling around in my head since the second loss.
There is something humbling in all of this, because the two-player game let me believe I had the thing figured out. I had a feel for it, a kind of easy confidence. Add one more person and the confidence drained away, mostly because I had been treating the edges of my pond as if they were mine to control. They never were. The river simply never pushed back hard enough for me to notice.
So where does that leave me with the game? I still like it, maybe more than I did after that first win, though I can't claim I have enjoyed every minute of finding out why. It is light, it is quick, and it teaches in about five minutes. The BoardGameGeek crowd seems to think three is its best count, and after two losses I am inclined to agree, if only because three is where the game stops letting you look at just one opponent and starts asking you to understand a small community. That is a lot to ask from a card game about a pond, and it mostly delivers.
The box sits near the front of the shelf now, where I will see it. The frog on the cover looks a little smug to me these days. I want another go at three players, and next time I intend to watch my neighbors' ponds as closely as I watch my own.
