Circle of Life, winner of the 2015 Best Combinatorial Game Award, is a 2-player strategy game where players control and evolve species in a food web. The player whose species fully colonize the ecosystem or eat a certain amount first wins. The game reflects the dynamics of real ecosystems despite rules that fit on a napkin
The species take the form of polyhexes on a hexagonal board, and a "Circle of Life" surrounding the board indicates which species can eat which.

Players evolve their species bit by bit, evolving them to take advantage of the food supply around them. But every evolutionary step also opens a species to predation from some other species. As a result, players must navigate a perilous balance between aggression and self-protection to win.

Despite elementary rules, the game captures key dynamics of real food webs. For example:
the ecosystem starts with simple organisms, which evolve into more complex ones over time.
evolutionarily simple species reproduce at higher rates than more complex ones, but also tend to have shorter lives and die in greater numbers.

when the population of one species is high, it drives up the population of the species that eats it.
species' complexity rises as you go up the food chain, but when a species at the top of the chain dies, it feeds back into the bottom.