How to Play Search for The Lost Species (Rules School)

hello my friends it's the Game Boy geek here and today we find ourselves as scientists moving around the hills mountains rainforests swamps and towns trying to locate one of the many lost species the search for lost species is the sequel to The Smash Hit and my favorite deduction game of all time the search for Planet X now it's a game about real world research and it's for one to four players takes 60 to 75 minutes to play it's for ages 14 and up and published by Renegade game studios today we'll be doing a rule school where I'll teach you how to set up and play the game so that you don't have to read the rulebook yourself now I've placed time stamps below me in the description of this video just in case you want to jump to a specific section of the rules let's get started foreign [Music] species is a one to four player deduction game where each game you're gonna be searching for one of these lost species each with the different logic rules keeping every game fresh and different you'll be surveying by boat on the coastal regions or by foot going around mountains because they block adjacency or moving to a town giving you help from the locals sometimes giving you an immediate ability and game scoring or one-time ability or sometimes even ongoing abilities you'll be tracking all this information on a no cheat behind your player Shield keeping everything secret and you'll be learning things secretly from a free companion app that makes sure that you never get an incorrect answer over the course of the game you'll be placing sightings that you hope to be correct because later on if they prove to be you'll get points for this at the end of the game and if you're the first one to do it you'll be getting bonus points each area has either one animal in it or it's truly empty animals have specific logic rules which help you deduce where the Lost species is in every game that's different research for unlimited replayability and you're trying to get the most points by finding a lot of species and confirming sightings and not always the first player to do it we'll win to set up you're first going to place the board in the middle of the table for your first game make sure you're using this island that's long and narrow and it also has a sun in the middle of the compass in the upper left-hand part of the board next you'll decide which lost species you're looking for the Lost species deck looks like this has a question mark on it just like it does on the board and you can select one and place it there or you can randomly do that now this will give you a different logic rule for the species that you're looking for this game for example for the owl it is not across a mountain from any Lorry we'll talk about what that means later next on the lower right hand side of the board you'll see the town now there's a town deck that matches what this looks like you're going to shuffle this deck up you're then going to place four cards face up here and leaving the deck right there on the board you're then going to play some mountains you'll see that there's some here here and here depicted on the board and you'll place the wooden pieces that match that and what this does is it blocks adjacency from through a mountain like that and on the upper side of the board you'll see some there as well and again you'll place the pieces as that board depicted next in the boat you're going to place tokens and you're going to match them depending on the shape and place those corresponding shapes in those spots of the boat and it doesn't matter which sides are up on the tokens in the upper left of the board you'll see a start spot a few spots later you'll see a wood grain spot you're going to place the brown Expedition leader token on that first wood spot facing in the direction of the arrows each player will then select the color to play and they'll take all the components of that color they'll take one of their scientists and place them on the start spot in a line in random order next everyone's going to get a note sheet and it's going to be specific to where you're sitting at the table right now we are sitting south of the board because we're looking at it this way we are south of the board so we are going to take a sheet that says South on it you also want to make sure that you're using the correct Island the shape of the island and of course it always has that sun in the compass there now if you were sitting like this on the east side of the board you would take a note sheet that had East and the upper left because remember now this island looks just like it does from your Vantage Point next each player will get a player Shield of the color that they chose of their components and scientists and they're also going to take their Town token camera trap Lori Diamond token and all their sighting tokens and place them behind their Shield as well for the siding tokens you can place them face down to make sure no one else can see that if they get up and move around or you could play some face up if you're comfortable with that each player will need something to write with I recommend a pencil because you might be erasing but those do not come with the game and you'll write your name at the top of your sheet the next thing you'll do is download the free companion app on the operating systems App Store that you're using now one player needs to have it but all players can have it because if only one player has it you'll be passing that device around the table during turns so it's best if all players download it you do need an internet connection to download the app but you do not need one to play the game so you'll download the free app and then you'll open it then make sure that you select the animal or the Lost species that you're looking for so here again we had selected the owl so you would select that otherwise you can hit the arrows and you can select a different one if you want to but this is how you can select it in the app so hit select now you have an easier game or a harder game we're using the side of the island it's the easier game for your first game notice it has the sun icon next to the easier game also notice that it has the enter code there at towards the bottom we'll get to that in just a moment so one player will first hit start easier game and then it is going to give you a game code c8y4 now I just talked about before in that main menu where it said enter game code all other players that are playing that have downloaded the app to their device that want to use their own device will then hit that and then they will put in that code so then everyone is playing the same exact game now once you hit continue It'll ask you which side of the island or board are you facing so we are on the South if you remember so you would select that but if you were on the East like the other one I had selected you would select it like that again in the app it shows you the island and the compass to make sure you're sitting at the right spot and then you click continue and you selected difficulty level the rules state that if you've never played before you could select beginner there's nothing wrong with selecting novice however it's important that you can play with different levels meaning if you're playing with a child and you're an adult you could select maybe experience then they might select novice or beginner you can change different levels as long as everyone is in agreement with who's playing at what level most of the time you're going to play at the same level but you select a level like let's say for example beginner it'll tell you how many facts eight facts I'm going to click continue and it is going to show me some facts now this is going to be different from every for everybody and so now we see here from the app what we're going to notate on our board now notice I placed this game code here because of my device malfunctioned or rebooted or something I could put that code back in and be right back into the game notice that I wrote in the logic rule for the Lost species the owl here as well so now here we see what the app was telling us to do now this is giving us those starting facts and so for example it says on number three there's no toad each of the island spots are numbered you'll see number three it said no toad so I crossed that out I like to actually color in the ones from the beginning of the game that I know for a fact that our these are true and then later on as I did do these things I put X's because those are easy to erase and these ones tell me that these are for sure correct so you go through for each of the clues that you see there on the app you're going to go through and cross out that specific animal on that specific number a very important concept of the game is that every area contains either one animal or it's truly empty and the area with the Lost species appears to be empty and we'll talk more about what that means later now at the bottom left left here you'll see all the different animals and you'll see what they're called the lorries couscous toads pythons for example then you'll click continue and it's going to tell you what to write into the research and conferences section so you're going to take everything that this app says here and you're going to write that in the research and conference for each of the letters these are different each game but these are the same for each player in each game so for here like a is Toad B is Swap this tells you as we do researchers as we'll show you later you'll learn about certain things like some of the animals themselves or some of the terrains like swamps and rainforests and stuff and even things about the Lost species so everyone will write those down in their Notepad now if there were more than just you that was going to use this device you could add a player to this device in the middle there that will make sure that you can both use it without seeing secret things from the other player or if you're playing a solo game you would click that at the bottom but that's out of the scope in this video now also it tells you where to place your scientists like it says place your scientist on Space 7 of the map there at the top and it shows I'm waving there now if you click on that number scientist there it'll actually change the color so you basically change it to what color you are in this case I'm red then you go ahead and you click Start game now this is the main sort of screen you'll see on the app as you're playing it's going to allow you to take the different actions but now that we're set up let's talk about what you're trying to do in the game and how you go about doing it now the object of the game is to be the one with the most points at the end and you're gonna be getting points by confirming correct sightings of different animals each of those will be worth certain points being the first to do so will get you more points and finding the lost species will get you points depending on if you're the first one to do it or not because you don't have to be the first one this is not necessarily a race even though you're trying to be the first one to do it you can win the game without being the first person to find the Lush species the game is played over multiple turns and the player whose turn it is is the one whose scientists is the furthest back on the time track on the board if players are tied like they are at the beginning of the game here it's the one that's furthest back it's going to be their turn so on your turn you're going to take one of these five actions that's right on your player's shield and these take a certain amount of time depending on which action you select and again time is how far you're gonna move on that time track because you might take one great big turn and other players might take little turns in between your next turn or vice versa so let's say in this case we want to survey by boat now it says You must start and move to an end only on the coast of the beach you can move four to six you can double back but you have to go at least four different areas and then you're gonna survey for one animal and it's gonna cost us two times so let's say we started here again we are going to move only on the coast so you're only moving around the edges of where the water is essentially like that now if we move if we went this way like one two three four that's four different ones it does not count the one we started it it'd be one two three four because you have to go at least four different areas when you're moving in the boat but you can move four to six now I just mentioned you don't count the space you started it and that's true unless you double back so for example I could go one two three four five because I've entered in one two three four five different areas that's okay because you have to do at least four different areas remember the one you start in does not count so on the app I would select survey by boat shows it two times I click there and again it tells you exactly the same things that's on your player Shield tap four to six adjacent coastal areas and one animal so remember I started in seven so I'm gonna go to eight so it highlights and back to seven it highlights six five four now if I didn't want to do that I could hit them again and they would remove them as you see five and four just got removed so there I'm in at least four areas and I'm going to select an anal at the top of of where the boat is you'll see animals and I can select different animals here in this case I'm going to select the couscous and it's going to tell me now this says there are two couscous in areas four through eight now there it shows the two couscous but then it says action four dash eight C that's shorthand for between spots four to eight and I'm looking for couscous the result was two so that is shorthand for that now I did use that shorthand here 4-8 C result two now it also shows you the short hands here Loris is L couscous C and things like that now what I do is I Mark some stuff on here you can make your own sort of note taking uh things here but I like to in this case say hey I linked all the ones where that there might be two of them with a letter A for example they're all linked together with the letter a and there's two of them so once I find two of these I know the other ones they can't be there that's just my personal way of taking notes in these types of games but you can use any way that you want to let you know that you have from these areas here from four through eight uh you essentially have two couscous so remember that cost me two times so I will move here and you put yourself sort of an edge so when other people go here they'll be in front of you remember whoever is in the back goes first so now who's ever last in this case it's yellow it'd be their turn so now that you've seen an action and I did some things let's talk now a little bit more about the different animal types that we are learning about to try to find a lost species now they all have different logic rules and these are the same for everybody and for every game now for example the lorries this shows you this here now this is a lorry Diamond because the lorries are always together and they always form a diamond which is why you have this because as you're starting to look for things you can be like well there might be they may be here they may be here and you're going around and using this to help deduce things couscous they are one or two areas from both other so even though there's three of them there's four lorries three couscous they're all within one or two areas of each other so if I find that like The Chew couscous right here we know the third one can't be more than two away from any of the other ones so that helped with it the codes so there are actually five empty or truly empty areas which means there's going to be nothing there each of the Toads is adjacent to at least two truly empty areas the python is not adjacent to a couscous now the Lost species itself we'll talk a little bit about that later because as you search for things and you see an empty space it could either be truly empty or it could be where the Lost species is so let's say the other two players took turns now you're always going to write down what they did and I'll show you why this is very important later but let's say Greg did a survey by foot and he went to one and then 13 to 14 because they're all sort of adjacent to each other there and he looked for Lori's l so that's sort of the shorthand there Stephanie put a camera trap CT for camera trap and then in space 10. surveying by foot is similar to surveying by boat but allows you to move across the island which the survey by boat action does not allow you to do and you can only move one to three and it takes three time because it takes longer on foot and you can double back the camera trap now it requires you to have your camera trap token and you can move one to three and you can double back and then you set this where your movement ends so in this case Stephanie ended on Space 10 and she put her camera trap on the board you only have one of these so once it's out there you can't do this again until it gets back to you and we'll show you how that happens later this is going to tell you exactly what's in that spot but it might appear empty and if it appears empty it's either truly empty or the Lush species might be there you've got to figure that out now this is how the time track might look I'm the furthest back so I'm the one that gets to go right now so let's say we want to try and narrow down these couscous some more maybe we want to lay a camera trap maybe like right there for example now remember you move one to three but you can double back so I might just go one two and then I'm going to place my camera trap here okay so let's select camera trap on the app remember it's going to cost us four time there on the right we're gonna select remember camera trap we're gonna do it we're gonna go here we're gonna hit continue and look at that a couscous is in area four so it's a CT for action ct4 and result is a couscous so we know now remember for that said it appears empty that means it's either truly empty or the Lost species is there that's very important to grasp so I know for a fact that the couscous is here now in each area there's only one item there so in this case it is a couscous so I know that there's nothing else here so I X those out now remember I knew that there was between all of here two couscous and we know that couscous has to be within one or two areas of both other which means there couldn't be one more than two from here one two so I know that this one and this one they're not there so I know that that from here there's either one here or here based upon my early deductions now that was great information but it cost a lot of time I was here and I had to go one two three four when you're moving forward you never count the wood grain spots that's only for the Expedition leader now that the X expeditionally there's the furthest one back where you're going to activate and Advance the Expedition leader now what we're going to do first is we're going to be able to make sightings now you can make zero one or two sightings using your settings remember these are face down right now but on the back side there are animals that you're going to say hey I I'm making a siding I'm pretty sure that there's something here that is this animal and so all players simultaneously you're going to play zero one or two of those tokens face down in front of themselves and they're going to cover it like this so people don't know how many they're doing you might be doing zero and bluffing others once everyone has their hand like this everyone can release you know reveal in this case we're going to be placing one but some players may have been bluffing then players will be placing their tokens in the time track from back to front so yellow is going to go first then purple then red again only if they have one and when it's their turn they'll place all of them because they might be placing more than one now they can place it anywhere they don't have to place it where their scientist currently is so let's say this yellow player placed one here we don't know what they placed there but they did put it in one now we now know that earlier this player here did in number one they did a you know a search they did a survey by foot and and they were looking for a lorry hmm well if they've placed a token there uh either they're really trying to screw us up which they probably wouldn't try to do I'll tell you why in just a moment but they likely have found a lorry there so we might want to make a notation here of like maybe a question mark or something like that and now we know wow that's a lorry then the other lorries either have to be here or here or here hmm interesting so I would normally make some Marks here saying hey this is probably very probable that that's there now let's say that purple they went ahead and placed one and the purple player placed one in 10 that's why they did the camera trap so since they placed something there it's likely that it's not truly empty because if it was you probably wouldn't have put in a token there so that might give us some information as well and we are placing one here remember you could play zero one or two and you don't have to place them even though this one happens to be with our scientist is it doesn't have to be now we're going to place these timing tokens now this one here it says three that's what we're going to be placing on here so for the tokens that replace this round by the way you can place where other players are placing this round uh and earlier and I'll talk about some cabbies to that in just a moment but so this one will get a Time token of three because that's what we're placing this round this one will also get a three and so will the other one now it is possible that multiple players had placed here in the same round let's say for somehow purple knew that that was there they would both go on top of each other because they are known even though they're done one was done actually before it's still the same round so it's considered the same time also note that this is not a final version of the game the game will only have the three it won't have the little one because it gets a little confusing there so the tokens might look a little bit different and the first one that you'll be placing in the final board will actually be the number one token not the number three token but you always just place the one that is shown with the arrow down on it now a couple more things about the siding tokens you cannot move that token to a different area once it's placed and if you run out of citing tokens for a specific animal you cannot report any more settings of that animal you cannot place two of the same animal sighting tokens in the same area but you can put different ones you do that if maybe later you confirm that the one you put earlier was incorrect and you still want to get some points and you can always pick up and secretly look at your own sighting tokens on the board at any time just don't show anybody else so you might be saying why am I making these sightings because if they're shown to be correct which we'll show you in just a bit when those get revealed you'll be going to be getting points for every one of these at the end of the game so if my couscous is correct which I know it is it's going to get me three points plus if I was the first one to say so I'll get an additional point so you're gonna be learning things from other players but they're incentivized to do so because it's the only way they're going to score points then you would see if there's any time one tokens on there and you would see if you would confirm sightings now it's the beginning of the game so there aren't going to be any tokens out there but you know that these are times three so those will get revealed when the Expedition leader leaves the spot first we're going to be placing new sightings with the number five and then all the threes are going to get revealed and we'll find out if players are right or wrong now we'll go over how that works in just a moment but once you've finished this this Expedition leader is going to go to the next wood grain space sometimes there'll be certain things on there like this says hey everyone gets to retrieve their Town token this is an action I have not yet gone over yet so let's go over it right now now let's say I want to visit a town it has shown on your board you can move one to three and you must end in a town now remember these mountains they block adjacency so when moving I can't like go through the mountain I have to go around it but luckily I can go one two and the third movement brings us into the town and I'll place a town token there and I won't get this back until the Expedition leader leaves a space with that town token on it and since I went to a town I now get to take one of these cards now this is cool this is is like hey birders at the end of the game for every confirmed sighting I have of the lorries I'll get an additional point or and this is an end game maybe it's an ongoing every time I take a move by foot search by foot I get a it only cost me two times instead of three for the rest of the game or one time I can use this and to discard it and place my camera trap in a swamp but only cost me two times a set of four or here is something that would activate immediately I would get to make a con I would basically be able to make a siding right now and then discard it now when you take a car let's say I take this one then it immediately gets replaced like this now to see what all of these icons do the last page of the rulebook talks about all the details of each of these cards that you can refer to now when you visit the town on the app it's going to ask you well which research do you want to do and it's all of them there so maybe I want to say couscous because that's sort of what I'm working on so I would select that one in the app and it would give me some information and it told me that two couscous are adjacent to a mountain now you can use I use sort of a a little bit of shorthand to show you how you can work or you could write it out either you could put it in this other notes section I like to just keep writing it across but you can do whatever's good for your note-taking so two couscous are adjacent to a mountain at some point during the game the Expedition leader Pond might be leaving one of these this is a conference and its number is one and at this point only one player has to do this and they can read it aloud to everyone they click lost species conference and they'll select one or two in this case it was one so we'll select one click view at the bottom right and there you go and so they will tell you something about the Lost species everyone can write this down on their notepad for example owl does not have two more animals total to the south east and make sure you look at the compass on the board from your Vantage Point and so I'd write that in conference one the law species does not have two or more animals to the southeast now remember there's a compass on the board for the reason we're facing this way so it means in this way so the Lost PC doesn't have two more animals in this direction so if the last species was here it could it could be here because there couldn't even be two animals here but if it was here and there were two animals here it couldn't be here because of here now depending on which way you're facing the board uh you know it'll it'll be a little bit different but you're always following your orientation aboard showing Southeast so let's say we got to this point and players if they want to we already went through if they wanted to create sightings for five let's say nobody did but now we're going to look and confirm sightings that are at time three if there's more than one three-time token on the board you go in sequential order so we'll start with number one here so this was time three so what you'll do is only one person has to do this is they will select confirm sightings on the app and they will in this case there's only one token so they'll take this and they will flip it up and so that is a lorry so on the Epic selected confirm sightings and they're going to tap an area and an animal so we're in area one so we'll tap that and then we'll Type Tap the Lorry and the animal so we'll hit continue it says correct area one has a lorry all players who were first to report this should Mark this on their notepads obviously you can't place a signing token anywhere that it's already been confirmed that you know what's there now the person that got it correct and they were the first one to do it where you Circle here the area so they would Circle one because that's going to get them an additional point this is actually my notepad but the person who got it correct first we get it there if multiple people were under the same time token meaning they got there in the same round and they both were correct they all would Circle that and get those those extra points at the end now if there are multiple tokens here uh you would flip one of them up and do it if it's incorrect you would only then flip up the next token at this time and you'd do the same thing if it's incorrect then you know then we don't flip anything else only the tokens for this time period however anytime anyone is incorrect as a penalty they must move their token one space on the time track and they lose the incorrect citing token back to the box and cannot place it again on the board later which is why players won't just Place tokens to throw other people off now again in this case it was correct but let's say there was a second token there well now that it was correct we get to flip all of the tokens so this one would get flipped and again if it was correct they were at the same time so they would also get that bonus Circle that that area one on their sheet they'll get a bonus point at the end of the game if they're incorrect they would just move on the time track and and these would get removed but since it was correct we would flip these and so first of all look at this red one here and it is correct okay so it will stay there and they'll be getting some points out of the game the purple one is not correct so in this case they would move up one in the time track for a penalty and they would lose this back to the box it would not be able to place it again for the rest of the game and even though that red player will get points at the end of the game for that since they were not the first ones there which was the yellow and purple for being there earlier at time three those ones will get the bonus points the red one will not because they weren't there first or at least tied for first so at the end of the game that's going to get me two points but it's not going to get me the bonus single point for being the first one there and at the end of this you'll remove the timing tokens assuming it was all correct if not you would leave the ones that are for future times you would repeat this process for every single area that has a timing token that is supposed to be flipped and confirmed at this time so for example everyone would have found out that there is a couscous there and maybe we found out that there was a python from the camera trap that they had cited and just remind you there's only one python so once you've found it you know it's not going to be anywhere else Now The Last Action I haven't talked about is locating the Lost species and as you can see it's going to cost five times so if I select that now when you locate the Lost species it reminds you of the the species for this game which is the owls not directly across a mountain from any lorry now we know there's a lorry here because it was confirmed and this is a mountain it can't be across a mountain meaning it cannot be there just from the rule that the owl cannot be there I remember when it says adjacent adjacent is always anything that it touches but remember adjacency is blocked by any mountains so let's show you this in the app you're going to select an area so here I have area nine see the question mark if I hit it I unselect it I'm going to select it in area 9 and I hit continue then you're going to locate two adjacent areas and say what's in them now keep in mind that that 16 is not adjacent because it has the mountain shown by that Red Mountain so let's say I'm going to select the 10 highlights I'm going to select the species python it kind of puts it there and it highlights it I'm going to say continue then I need to select another adjacent area so I'm going to select 8 and let's say I think uh it's a toad and I'm going to hit continue this is going to be wrong by the way and it's going to hey confirm you think that there's a you know a python there a toad there and a lot of species there and says Nope you did not find it you're going to go five time however if I did get it correct said you found it uh now you do not announce where you found it so it's very important not to say where it is to anyone else and assuming that you're the first player to do this which we are that's why I would say you'd still Advance five on the time track now that would trigger the end of the game and all their players don't take a tournament as normal but they will see how far back they are on the time if they are between one and five they can either look for the Lost species for a certain amount of points or they can report a certain amount of sightings to try to gain points that way and again that's how many time spaces they are back remember do not count the wood grain time meaning two this player is two away and this player is one two three four five away if that makes sense now once each player has finished those final turns remember you're always doing that from furthest back in the time order as normal uh once that's completed you can click end game and reveal all at the bottom left of the app anyone says hey are you sure you want to do this you click reveal all it'll show you the solution to the puzzle and then essentially you're going to go with any of the sightings that are still on the board that have not been confirmed or not you're going to go through confirming those or not if they are not correct they get removed from the board there's no penalty at this time if they are correct they will get points for those at the end and I'll show you now but they also still get the first time bonus if they are the first person to have a sighting in that area as normal then everyone will score on their own for example I have three circles here which means I was the first or at least tied for the first to have the correct sighting there so I got three of those each of those are a point so it's three I had two confirmed Lorry signings they reach worth two points so I have four I had three confirmed couscous setting the restore is three points so I have a total of nine I was the first one to find the lost PC so I got 12. this this shows you how many you'd get if you were one two three four or five spaces behind on the time track so if someone was five spaces behind you they would also have gotten the same 12 for being first but the closer the other less points they get you might get points from certain Town cards this one says I got an additional point for each confirmed sighting of the couscous so three there for a total of Thirty One Whoever has the most points is the winner if there's a tie the one who scored the most points for locating a lot of species is the winner if it's still tied the one for who has the most leader bonuses that's these things here would win and if it's tied you rejoice in the shared Victory I'm not going to cover the solo game here but it does feel like a two-player game and it's very competitive and you can see the solo section of the rules to explore that on your own well I hope this helped you dive right into the search for lost species faster than you normally would if you had to read the rule book yourself now if you have further questions about the rules I've placed the link below me in the description of this video and that's the best place to ask them since I'll be notified but so will Renegade game studios

Channel: TheGameBoyGeek - Hi Quality Hi Energy Board Game Reviews

Views: 6,559

Keywords: Game boy Geek, Rules School, The search for lost species, The search for lost species board game, The search for lost species game, The search for lost species rules, dice tower, how to play The search for lost species, instructional, gameboygeek, dan king, best board games, board game, board game review, catan

Id: DCd6nXrjQpE

Length: 31min 30sec (1890 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023