Age of Bacteria

Age of Bacteria is a strategy game about a bacteria culture on an endless petri dish. You pick a species and tap a spot on the map. The temperature there becomes your strain's favourite, and the culture starts to grow. From then on you keep it alive against rival colonies, seasons, famine and environmental disasters. Cells eat sugar first and biomass second. On a rich sugar patch a colony grows explosively. Once it has eaten the patch faster than it regrows, starving cells burst and drain their neighbours, and famine runs through the colony like a wave. Seasons shift the whole map by up to 10°C, heatwaves and cold fronts sweep across it, and from the sixth minute on medical treatment starts: a course of the antibiotic that hurts you most. Usually the right answer is to move out. A Blitz run lasts 10 minutes, a Standard run 25. The longer the clock runs, the harder the host fights back with antibiotics and macrophages, until the autoclave sterilizes the dish. Endless has no clock. HOW YOU PLAY • Drag a circle over your cells to split them off as an army, then tap a target. The army marches there, fights whatever is in the way and settles. • Spend ATP on sugar drops, heat, cryo and salt bombs, forced mutations, penicillin and colistin. • Offer a rival an alliance, or merge it into a hybrid strain that inherits its better resistances. • Spend DNA in the evolution tree on resistances, combat, bombs, survival and ten techs only your species has. Resistance and virulence open late in a run. • Every time your colony reaches a new stack, the game stops and offers three random mutations. You keep one for the rest of the run. • Race rivals to finds like rotting fruit, spilled milk or a plasmid. Hold breeding grounds such as the kindergarten, the hospital or the gym, and infect sterile facilities like the operating room. BOSS FIGHTS The ten bosses are real organisms from the history of microbiology, from forest soil to an intensive care unit. Among them are Fleming's Penicillium, MRSA and Acinetobacter baumannii, the top of the WHO's list of resistant bacteria. No antibiotic touches a mold or an amoeba. You have 8 minutes and a fixed amount of DNA to beat each one. 19 SPECIES, MODELLED ON REAL BACTERIA E. coli adapts to heat, cold and pH. D. radiodurans starts fully resistant to radiation. B. subtilis turns into spores when it starves. S. aureus builds biofilm walls, M. xanthus hunts in packs, I. sakaiensis grows on toxic waste and H. pylori neutralises acid ground. Penicillin kills Gram-positive strains and colistin Gram-negative ones, so check a rival's species before you pick the drug. BETWEEN RUNS • Three lab contracts are always open and pay DNA, ATP and points. • Contracts, trophies and finished runs raise your lab level. New levels open species and lab techs, up to level 20. • Before a run you switch on up to three of 25 genes. Every trophy opens another one. • The daily culture is the same map, species and twist for everyone on that date. Playing on consecutive days builds a streak. • 27 trophies and a high score list for every species. Five difficulties run from Peaceful, where rivals never attack, to Brutal, where they grow fast, raid every 50 seconds and betray alliances. FREE VERSION AND FULL GAME The free version has E. coli and Streptococcus on Peaceful, Easy and Normal. A one-time in-app purchase unlocks the other 17 species, Hard and Brutal, and the endless upgrades. The game has no ads. OFFLINE The game runs entirely on your device. It needs no account and no internet connection and collects no data. Saves stay on your phone unless you export them to a file.