Tide Pool

Eat, evolve, survive — every trait you add has a trade-off, and the pool keeps changing what it takes to win.

How to play

Steer your microbe around a living pool, eating food motes for energy and DNA while dodging hazards. Survive a generation, then spend your DNA on new traits — speed, size, defenses and more. After you upgrade, the environment shifts, so the build that just worked may not anymore.

• Food gives energy to survive and DNA to spend between generations
• Every trait carries a cost or trade-off — there's no free upgrade
• The pool's conditions change each generation, rewarding adaptable builds

Controls

• Desktop: move with WASD or the arrow keys
• Phone & tablet: hold and drag toward where you want to swim

Game modes

• Daily: one shared seeded pool each day
• Practice: endless fresh evolution runs

Tips & strategy

• Bank a little DNA rather than spending it all — the next environment may need a different trait
• Stay near food clusters but keep an escape route from hazards
• Read the upcoming environment shift before committing to specialized traits

What you'll learn

Tide Pool is an eat-and-evolve survival game where natural selection drives the upgrades, making evolution something you experience.

• Skills: natural selection, evolution, adaptation, survival pressures
• Best for: roughly grades 6–11 (ages 11–16)
• For parents & teachers: evolution by selection, felt rather than memorized.

About Tide Pool

Tide Pool is an original eat-and-evolve survival game where natural selection drives the upgrades. It's free to play in any modern browser.

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