Ethan Bardoe 2023
During a recent board game meet-up, friends set up the board for Stoneage, a traditional worker-placement-house-building-resource-collect’em-up. After the first round of distributing our cave people, we noticed that the vast majority of tokens were in the food-producing space. Someone joked, “Looks like the mammoths are about to go extinct.” To which our designated rules player replied, “We won’t run out of food tokens, and if we do, we’ll just use paper chips.” That statement was a call to reflect on the underlying assumptions that most board games are built on: that resources are unlimited, and their harvesting is a net positive, meaning that the benefits of extracting resources will always outweigh the impacts of doing so.
Stone Age By Z-Man Games, one of my favorite worker placement games.
As climate change and its consequences poke holes in this premise, we can see that such beliefs result in rampant environmental degradation. Board games have always tried to depict humans' relationship with the world around them. Living in a world with anthropogenic climate change, we should reconsider how we portray the environment in media, including board games. While a change in perspective has begun, we need board games to go further in reflecting a more complicated relationship between humans and the environment.
A quick look at the history of Eurogames, such as Settlers of Catan, reveals how most board games have conceptualized the environment. Many such games originated in Germany during the 1980s as an alternative to wargames. In the wake of World War II, German officials were conscious of what culture its citizens consumed and worried that board games such as Risk and other wargames were too imperialistic and militaristic for the public. In response to these games being banned, a new style of game was created. Instead of direct conflict between players, Eurogames focused on competing for resources to outbuild, outproduce, and outmaneuver--crushing opponents under a prodigious pile of victory points. Eurogames quickly gained popularity and inspired creators worldwide, with classic examples being Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, and Castles of Burgundy. While these games were not militaristic, they were designed in nations that benefited from the natural resources of colonies. In these games, land’s purpose is to be controlled and cultivated, with as many resources harvested as possible, with no end in sight. These games envision worlds where all resources are entirely renewable and sustainability is not a concern.
Thomas Cole's Oxbow shows a clear divide of biomes like in Settlers of Catan
Starting in the last decade, a new trend of games has begun to celebrate nature’s intrinsic value instead of viewing it as a wealth of resources. Notable examples are 2018’s smash hit Wingspan and 2022 Spiel winner Cascadia. These games use similar resource-accruing mechanics but do not focus on human control of the environment. While older Eurogames cast players as workers building castles, colonies, or civilizations, these newer games are about uncovering aspects of natural beauty and recasting the themes of resource-gathering and building. In Cascadia, Instead of playing Castle Architect #5, players embody nature to build healthy and beautiful habitats. Beautiful artwork (shout out to artist Beth Sobel) soothingly immerses players in wild landscapes and ties the experience of game-playing biophilia, which is the baked-in human tendency to feel emotion in response to the natural world.
Some of my favorite environmentally-focused games, Cascadia, Wingspan, and Photosynthesis.
This nature-appreciation genre of board games focuses on the world of nature itself, without any interaction with humans. A few games go so far as to explore the impacts of humans overworking land and harming the planet. Spirit Island casts players as ancient gods repelling an invasion of colonizers, in which one of the biggest threats is blight tokens made by settlers spreading and overusing land. One of 2022 Gencon’s brightest stars was The Spill, a cooperative board game where players scramble to clean up a massive oil leak. This game is even accompanied by a lesson that can be taught in science classes to explain the importance of healthy environments.
Spirit Island and the Spill, are board games putting forward newer stories for this medium.