Trias (game)

Trias is a strategy board game designed by Ralf Lehmkuhl and first published in 2002, carried since by Rio Grande Games, Tilsit Editions and Gecko Games under different regional editions. The game casts players as competing dinosaur species racing to spread across the shifting landmasses of a prehistoric Earth. Wooden dinosaur-shaped pieces, cubic in the earliest editions and more sculptural in later ones, are maneuvered across hexagonal terrain tiles that represent the slow drift of continents, forcing players to adapt their territory as the board itself reshapes. Points accumulate as a species successfully colonizes new continents, and the game reaches its end when a meteor strikes the earth, an event drawn directly from the extinction that closed the real Mesozoic era. The player with the most accumulated points at that moment wins. Trias remains notable among strategy games for building its central mechanic, continental drift, directly into the win condition rather than treating it as flavor text.