In general the more powerful the card, the more costly the ability is to use. Lastly life points may be expended in the cell devision phase of the game. Here players may buy an additional amoeba and place it on the board in a square beside a current amoeba of their colour. This is how your creatures reproduce. This is important for scoring purposes as we shall see later.
All life requires sustinance and amoeba are no different.
In order to live your creatures must feed. When a creature feeds normally, it excretes two blocks of it's colour. Thus as your population grows food becomes rarer for you and more abundant for the other players. If your creatures cannot feed they get a damage marker. Scoring is a tight affair right up to the end.