Quirks: the 1980 board game equivalent of Spore
by Kevin Kelly 
on Jun 16th 2008 8:15PM
As you know, we sometimes like to cut the wires and take things
Off the Grid, which can lead to bouts of surfing through websites like
BoardGameGeek until 5 in the morning ... allegedly ...
However, all of that browsing paid off in spades when we stumbled across
Quirks, a board game from the magical year of 1980. Looks a bit familiar, doesn't it? We wonder if Will Wright ever sat down with this back in the day. He would have been around 20 years old when it came out, and he's admittedly a huge fan of board and strategy games, so you do the math. Find out more about genetic manipulation in the 80s after the break (spoiler: it wasn't all big hair, bangle bracelets, and friendship pins).
Quirks is an evolution-based game of "Un-natural Selection!" as the box top states. One to four players form bizarre plants and animals in this card game, and have to keep adapting them so they can survive in different climates and against encounters with other "Quirks". Think something along the lines of
Go Fish meets a policeman's ident-i-kit and you've got
Quirks. We found a single copy of this on eBay this morning, and we're planning a Joystiq Quirk Off during E3. Stay tuned for a full report on the game when it arrives.
