Playing Games, Making Games

I got a chance today to play a 2nd game of Ark Nova's Marine Worlds expansion - here's a recap of my experience. My opponent was playing his first game of Ark Nova altogether - I gave him Map 0 and took two random maps for myself, happily picking up Silver Lake. The variant actions I saw were unexciting - I ended up taking a "Build +1" variant that helped a small amount, and a Cards variant with a Clever kicker that I never paid for. My initial draw was the Reef Dweller dream: A Shark I could play as my first Reef Dweller, along with two other solid Reef animals. I played an Expert on Asia as my first Sponsors and snapped up a 4th Reef animal, planning to go all in for the Sea Animals conservation project. The Caribbean Reef Shark was not as incredible as I had hoped - while strong, the ability is limited to animal cards in reputation range , which heavily limited what I could eat from the display. Despite grabbing a 2 Reputation University, I could only only eat a 6-