In the Habitats game, each player builds a vast wildlife park without cages or fences. The animals in your park need their natural habitats: grassland, shrubs, rocks or lakes. For example, the zebra needs a large area of ​​grass and some adjacent water, while a bat needs rocks, bushes and water, a deer needs bushes and grass, and a crocodile needs mainly water. There are snakes, baboons, bees, elephants, otters, lizards, turtles, eagles, meerkats, scorpions, boars, catfish, rhinos, and so on, each with their own landscape requirements - a total of 68 different animals.

Each player starts his individual park with an entrance tile and is represented on the animal tile market by a meeple. On a turn, a player takes the tile to the left, right or in front of him, moves his figure to the space just vacated and then draws a tile to place it where his figure was at the beginning of the turn.

When adding an animal tile to your park, you also add the main landscape - the basic tile for the animal - to your park. While placing this new animal, your own piece of landscape can help fulfill the demands of other animals, for example the water on a hippo tile meeting the water needs of the adjacent otter. Thus, it becomes increasingly difficult to meet every need of the land of all animals as you add more tiles.

In addition to expanding your park with different landscape types, flora and animals, you can improve its profitability by building additional access roads, hiking areas and observation towers.

Habitats lasts three seasons, with each player receiving 6-9 new tiles for their park in each season. Whoever best meets the season goal will receive bonus points, with a smaller number of points for second and third place. At the end of the game, each player scores for each tile in their park based on whether that tile's requirements have been met. Whoever scores the most points wins!