You start as an ingredient in the primordial soup and try to create life. Solitaire, competitive, and cooperative play options. 

Each turn an event card is flipped, and catastrophes are resolved from left to right, determining the climate, stripping cubes from organisms and refugia placards, and creating new landforms that can harbor life. Any organisms which lose all of their cubes go extinct. The Event cards also dictate turn order and which refugia and mutation card piles are active at that turn.