Play Nature in These Six (More) Board Games
Board game manufacturers and designers continue to be fascinated with nature. Perhaps it’s because the physicality and interactiveness of board games invites meditations on our relationship with the material world. Perhaps it’s because board games are deliberate (after all, it takes much more time to set up and tear down a board game than to, say, boot up a video game) and so evoke a simpler way of life—a kind of idyllic pastoral. Perhaps it’s simply because nature themes make for appealing art. Whatever the reason, nature-themed board games continue to be designed, produced, and amass commercial and critical success.
Nature-themed board games immerse players in elaborate, imagined ecologies. Their themes can be, in turns, Edenic or cutthroat, hopeful or mournful, idealistic or pragmatic. Often, the games indulge a desire to collect, contain, and acquire. Some games treat nature naively, reducing it to simple, predictable interactions easily controlled by the players. But they can also show a real desire to meaningfully engage in environmental representation and ecological thinking, including imagining and enacting humans-environment interactions.
The nature that game designers construct is constrained by the mechanisms of gameplay. These are games in the end, with points, winners, losers, and rules. Game design thus requires some level of distortion, reducing the ideas the game is exploring to mechanical details. When this goes too far, players criticize themes that are “painted on” to provide window dressing and not much else. This is not an accusation I’d level at any game on this list, but it is worth considering how their designers approach this tension.
These board games necessarily amplify and sublimate different aspects of nature in service of the game, the theme, and the designer’s perspective. This is part of what makes them so interesting. As quintessential social constructions of nature, they tell us a lot about how people imagine the environment and our role within within it—both for entertainment and beyond.
Ark Nova (2021)
The environmental board game Ark Nova bills itself as a game where players “plan and build a modern, scientifically managed zoo.” To that end, the game tries to simulate the actual institutions that zoos interact with. The player adds animals to their zoo of course, but just as importantly, they secure sponsors, partner with universities, and support conservation projects.
Instead of a single scoring track, players race to have their two different scores cross each other on tracks moving in opposite directions. The two scores, “appeal” and “conservation,” can be pursued independently. So, players may end up with an appeal-heavy zoo featuring petting areas and charismatic megafauna. Or they might create conservation-minded zoos that operate primarily as research sites and repositories for endangered animals. In this universe, appeal and conservation are thus the primary (and competing) objectives of zoos.
By focusing on the institutional side of zoos, the game gives somewhat short shrift to the animals themselves. These animals are reduced to their continent of origin, enclosure size, and broad category like predator or grazer. Their specific diet, lifecycle, and environmental needs are of little importance to the game.
The game focuses on realism and institutional management, but indulges in one fantasy: Great apes are nowhere to be found. This omission is a small concession, perhaps, to the moral quandary of imprisoning highly intelligent animals. In general, the game represents an idealized and upstanding zoo. Players are made to consider research and conservation and are unable to cut corners, neglect animals, or misrepresent their actions. This, of course, is a far-cry from the malfeasance that real-world zoos have indulged in.
Designed by Mathias Wigge.
Art by Steffen Bieker, Loïc Billiau, Dennis Lohausen, and Christof Tisch.
Cascadia (2019)
Cascadia is a puzzle-like game where players take turns pulling animal tokens from a bag and pairing them with habitat tokens that can support them. The player’s boards are slowly built out into an ecosystem with a variety of animal interactions and habitat regions. These animals and habitats are abstracted to spatial arrangements; the elk want to be grouped together in herds, the bears form small family units, while the hawks are territorial and don’t do well near other hawks.
The landscape is idealized. Humans are nowhere to be found, and players can expand infinitely in any direction they choose. Despite this geographic invention, Cascadia feels like a love letter to the Pacific Northwest, which is home for most of the design team. This is something of a trend in environmental board games: Temperate forests are common settings. Environments like deserts or tundras are less represented, perhaps because they don’t feel ‘nature-y’ or nostalgic enough to designers, who mostly come from the Global North.
Like many puzzle games, gameplay in Cascadia is relaxed and non-competitive, and the player and the playboard are both somewhat unmoored. Are we hikers slowly revealing the landscape? Are we the animals themselves, expanding into new habitats? Or are we gods remaking the Cascadia region according to our whims? It’s hard to say, but whoever or whatever the players are, they sure do want victory points.
Designed by Randy Flynn.
Art by Beth Sobel.
Wyrmspan (2024) and Finspan (2025)
Wingspan casts a long shadow over the environmental board game world due to its widespread popularity with long-time board game hobbyists and board game newcomers alike. Publisher Stonemaier Games builds on that success with two near-remakes, which take the game in distinct directions.
The first is Wyrmspan, which substitutes the real-life North American birds found in the original game with fantastical, made-up dragons. The bird facts that accompanied the original are replaced with fabricated facts that emphasize mystery, magic, and human-dragon relations. The implication is thus that the small songbirds of Wingspan are not visually or factually interesting enough to engage the imagination of some players. In this way, the game suggests a discontent with environmental realism in the board game world. Notably, the “facts” of Wyrmspan develop an ecology that is apparently more interesting than our own through lots of dynamic, pet-like interactions and histories.
Finspan, on the other hand, leans into real-world ecologies. The game reimagines Wingspan through the aquatic world of fish. It includes accurate portrayals of pelagic layers, predation, and adaptive traits. The geographic structure of Wingspan (bird habitats as distinct places) becomes temporal in Finspan (the time of day a dive is occurring). This accurately reflects the incongruity of these habitats, specifically the day-night cycles of oceanic habitats, with different fauna rising from the depths in the dark.
Both Wyrmspan and Finspan refine the gameplay of the original, tightening up the action using adventurers and divers, respectively, and rebalancing Wingspan’s mechanics, which used to more readily lead to a runaway winner.
Wyrmspan is designed by Connie Vogelmann, with art by Clémentine Campardou.
Finspan is designed by David Gordon and Michael O’Connell, with art by Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo and Mesa Schumacher.
Earthborne Rangers (2023)
Board games share a lineage with role-playing games (RPG), and the two genres often blend into each other. Earthborne Rangers is one such game. Players design a character, go on quests, and follow a storyline familiar to RPG veterans.
The game is set in a solarpunk future, where humanity has learned the lessons of climate disaster and now lives in harmony with nature, using fantastical technology to have limited impact on neighboring biomes. The game simulates a difficult day of bushwhacking. Players have to contend with weather, the landscape, flora, and fauna as they attempt to traverse the distant-future Rockies. The animals players meet are science fictional imaginations of how contemporary animals might evolve after a mass extinction event.
The gameplay of Earthborne Rangers mirrors the unpredictability and dynamism of wild nature. In particular, the game’s simulations of animals’ interactions with each other and the player is remarkable. The player’s adventures mimic the tribulations of backpacking. A sunny day and gentle terrain can lead to players whizzing around the map, while a mistimed storm, or the interest of dangerous animals in the player’s food can just as easily leave the player stuck in place.
Earthborne Rangers is a cooperative game, where players work together to achieve a goal. The goal, however, is a moving target. Sometimes players are given a specific task like finding a lost hiker. Other times, they can choose to explore (or ignore) an environment as they see fit, with no real winning or losing.
The game is also unique for its relationship to real-world sustainability. Environmental board games, ironically, have a substantial carbon footprint, with small production runs, overseas manufacturing, and a reliance on plastic. Earthborne Games, however, has adopted sustainable manufacturing practices. Besides the staples in its rulebook, Earthborne Rangers is entirely recyclable and compostable.
Designed by Andrew Fischer, Brooks Flugaur-Leavitt, Andrew Navaro, Adam Sadler, and Brady Sadler.
Art by Joe Banner and Evan Simonet.
Mariposas (2020)
In most games, players are either human actors or disembodied avatars. Mariposas takes a different tack by asking players to imagine themselves as successive generations of monarch butterflies. The players control the butterflies as they migrate north from Michoacán and spread across North America before returning south, in a migratory route that spans generations.
The game is meant to simulate actual hazards that monarchs currently face, including dwindling milkweed habitats (the sole food source of monarch caterpillars) and monarchs’ reliance on human waystations for safe harbor. The game is thus a striking inversion of most environmental board games, where humans are either centered or ignored altogether. The Mariposas map includes human city names but not borders, a reminder that animal ways are often mobile and transnational.
The game is a relatively straightforward pick-up-and-deliver game, where players gather resources and move them across the map. Over the course of this epic, multi-generational journey across North America, players experience how the butterflies are at the whim of the seasons. Board games have generally trended toward modeling ecosystems or multi-species panoplies. It’s interesting to see a game drill down specifically on the experience and life cycle of a single non-human species.
Designed by Elizabeth Hargrave.
Art by Matt Paquette & Co., Indi Maverick.
Daybreak (2023)
Environmental board games, especially those marketed as family-friendly fare, tend to not take up politics as central themes. An exception to that rule is Daybreak, a cooperative game in which players represent the world powers (China, Europe, the United States, and Majority World) and work together to fight climate change. Players win if they begin drawing down greenhouse gases. Players lose if global temperatures rise two degrees Celsius or if any region falls into social crisis.
The game casts a wide net in terms of green policy; radical solutions, like rewilding half of the earth, are next to technocratic policies, like green quantitative easing, and geo-engineering fantasies, like pumping sulfur into the stratosphere. Sometimes the game can seem staggeringly idealistic—cooperation between global powers is a given, and achieving generational projects like women’s empowerment comes down to playing the card in front of you. And yet beneath that idealism is a troubling core: Even with perfect global cooperation and an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach, beating climate change in the game is a difficult task.
The game treats climate change as fundamentally beatable if all the players work together. To create that sense of optimism, it has to elide all sorts of global disasters into a game mechanic that mostly operates by limiting the number of cards players draw during their turn. In games they “win,” players are not confronted with the fallout of the twenty-first century, including catastrophic ecological damage and countless deaths. Instead, the game puts a hopeful spin on climate action by focusing on positive possibilities and potential social movements.
Much like Earthborne Rangers, Daybreak’s publisher has adopted sustainable manufacturing in making the game, reflecting the game’s politics in their real-world actions. It’s heartening to see environmentally-minded business practices become more commonplace in the board game hobby space, especially in conjunction with the proliferation of nature as a theme.
Designed by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace.
Art by Mads Berg.
Featured Image: A set-up of the board game Daybreak. Photo by Adam Procter, 2023.
Nate Carlin is a writer, journalist, and boardgame enthusiast based in Madison, Wisconsin. He is currently working as the Interim News Director at WORT 89.9 FM, a community radio station. He loves walking the city, visiting the library, and playing all the games he can fit into his schedule. His last contribution to Edge Effects was “Get Playful With These Six Environmental Board Games” (March 2022). Contact.
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