from Gene Billingsley,
We'll have some more information up on the website over coming weeks, Mustafa. I played it for the first time yesterday, so I will probably not be using all the right terminology here (and Chad will cringe! 
http://talk.consimworld.com/Images/e/smile.gif[/img] ), but I'll give it a try:
Yesterday we played a six-player game of DS the Card game. It took us about 1 - 1.5 hours to finish and four of us had never seen the game before, so there was definitely a little learning time involved.
Game play is divided into 12 separate rounds of card play. Within each round, players compete for victory points over a single biome card. The 12 biome cards cover things like Wetlands, Desert, Tundra, etc. Each has a VP schedule on the front for the winner(s) of that biome, like 5, 3, 1, or 3,1 etc - for points given to first place, second place, etc. It also has visual matching creature symbols for the six classes - mammals, arachnids, birds, amphibians, snakes, insects).
So play proceeds sequentially around the table in each biome, with each player playing one card at a time from their hand (of six to start, you get 2 new cards each turn, which can be modified up if you survive well - more on that later). The cards you play have point values that you sum at the end of the turn to see which player(s) won that biome (and then they getthe VPs for it). But the cards all also have environment pics on them (water, grass, sky, etc) - sometimes in multiples, and there is competition for those as well. The cards have one final piece of info, and that is the one that allows, on some cards, you to suppress another one of the other players cards. When that happens you turn the card around so that the lesser values on a card are facing (so cards might have 5 points on one side and 3 on another, with lesser animal pics on the suppressed side as well) - so there is some definite and nasty "screw your neighbor" opportunity here.
At the end of the round, the player(s) with the most points gets the listed VPs and the player(s) with the most animal class pics that match whatever is listed on the biome card face gets VPs for those as well.
The tundra cards (six of the 12 biomes) are special, as they are worth only 1 VP each, but whoever wins each tundra card gets to move up on the survivability track. That track has two purposes: First, as you move along it, it enhaces your card draw between biomes from the normal 2 cards, to 3/1, 4/2, 5/3 and so on, where the first number is how many you draw and the second is how many you must discard. So you still KEEP two cards each biome, but the ones doing well in survivability get to SEE more cards to choose from. So those Tundra cards are really important. Also, at game end, the player(s) leading on the survivability track gets a 5 point VP bonus and the player(s) in last place each lose 5 points, so again, Tundra is a big deal and the fights for those cards can get vicious.
So the game proceeds biome to biome and you have to consider carefully how (and whether) to use your limited cards in the current biome or save them for the next biome (which everyone can see, as there is always a "coming biome" card flipped up in addition to what you're playing now.
So you do this for eleven rounds and those first 11 biomes are random, so they change from game to game and you never know how it's going to play out. The final biome, though, is always SEA, and it's a 12 VP winner-take-all VP biome (it also has scoring for every environment, with 3x for Water). This card is not big enough to make you a winner all by itself - you have to play well all along - but it IS big, so you have to choose during those last 2-3 cards that preceed it whether to use cards or save them for the big finale.
At the end, the player with the most VPs wins.
It's mechanically a really simple game, with some very clever strategic twists and options. All of us who played yesterday REALLY liked it - I think Chad has another big winner, here.
