Go Extinct!: Stardust Catches the Carnivores (2021)

Go Extinct! Stardust Catches the Carnivores is a new special edition of the award-winning Go Extinct! tabletop card game, incorporating artwork and concepts from the Stardust series of science books for young readers. Players complete sets of animals based on actual genetic clades, working to collect the most sets by inferring the other player’s cards and identifying common ancestors on the evolutionary tree. By the end, players will deeply understand the amazing fact that every carnivoran alive today — from the house cat to the polar bear — descended from a single prehistoric ancestor, the miacid! Based loosely on Go Fish, the goal is for players to collect as many sets of closely related animals as possible. The sets are "clades" of closely-related animals on the evolutionary tree board, which players use for reference. Players take turns asking another player for cards, and if they do not have a matching card, they say "Go Extinct!". The gameplay is more strategic than Go Fish because players can ask either for a specific card or a matching card at any level of the tree hierarchy, thus trading off the specificity of the result for the likelihood of a match.