This article originally appeared in Pyramid #29

Pyramid Pick

Ursuppe (Primeval Soup)

A game published in Germany
by Doris & Frank, 1997
Price varies

Ursuppe is a very fine, fun game for three or four players from the game design company/team of Doris & Frank. The setting is the primordial soup in which the first one-celled creatures came to life so long ago. Each player strives to win points by having the most amoebas, or the most advanced amoebas in the game.

Ursuppe has the usual fine components one expects from German games: wooden pieces, nicely illustrated cards, and a handsome board. (Actually, the board is a bit weak for a German game, but still not bad.) It also has what one does not expect from a German game, but what I'm delighted to find: rules, cards, and gamers' reference sheets in English! This is a move I wish more German game companies would adopt - I'd love to see more German games being played in the U.S.A., and this should help Ursuppe sell here. The game certainly deserves big sales, as it's one of the most fun games I own.

Each player has seven amoebas of the same color - there are four different colored sets. There are numerous food particles (small cubes of wood), painted in the same identical colors. Each turn, your amoebas must each eat three food particles: one of each of the colors that you are not. So a red amoeba needs to eat one blue, one green, and one yellow food particle - or starve that turn. Starvation is shown by placing a bead on the peg each amoeba comes with. When you have two beads, you . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.




Article publication date: April 17, 1998


Copyright © 1998 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.