Four kinds of hunger in a ring. Nothing is wasted.
How many at the table? You are the first seat; the rest are played by the machine.
How it works
One move a turn. That is the whole turn.
Type is the only thing that matters in combat. Each kind eats exactly one kind and is eaten by exactly one. The fourth is neutral — you can stand nose to nose forever.
Size is only speed. Small moves 1 hex, medium 2, big 3. Size never wins a fight.
Pieces block, tokens don't. You cannot move through anything alive, yours included. Stepping onto something you eat kills it and ends your move on the spot.
Every kill leaves a corpse. Permanent, neutral, and the board never forgets. Carrion eat corpses, decomposers turn them to growth, herbivores eat growth. Carnivores eat nothing but the living.
The small ones eat best. A small scavenger that eats gets a whole extra move, and can chain it. A medium gets one. A big gets nothing but the pleasure of denying it to everyone else.
You lose the moment nothing on the board is food for anything you own. Watch the strip under the board: those are your teeth. Killing the last thing you eat is suicide.
If nobody has killed anything in twenty rounds, the table goes to whoever has eaten the most.