I loved being able to craft an experience for others. I also loved that the themes that my team and I wanted to get across were effectively communicated to my teammates through gameplay. The major types of fun associated with the game were challenge, discovery, and fellowship. The mechanics worked together to inspire both competition and fellowship by making resources scarce and by giving players the opportunity to share these resources (in limited capacities) or compete for them. Through this competition and cooperation, our lessons about the major challenges facing conservationists were elucidated.
The mechanics of having a finite number of tiles that all host different biomes and having finite cash to explore and change these tiles brought competition and cooperation. Using finite resources to discover tiles, move animals, place more animals on the board, change the suitability of a tile for an animal by terraforming, and create (expensive) sanctuaries to guarantee an animals safety incentivized players to think strategically about how to spend their money and where to place their animals. The feature that different biomes have a “type” from 1 to 3 reinforces the fact that even if an animal belongs to a biome, it can’t live in every environment that belongs to that biome.
See board and numbers on tile for tiles 1-3
These actions also gave players enough possibility space to think strategically about their next move. The game is designed to make players run out of resources quickly to mandate them to use a round to get funding. These funding cards typically have disastrous effects on all players, but sometimes they offer the player who drew the card flexibility to either help or hurt their fellow players. Typically players begin with cooperation in mind, but while resources dwindle and the mandatory natural event cards at the beginning of every turn destroy the environments, they begin to compete for resources. This was an important goal for us. We wanted to teach the race against time that conservationists must face, the scarce amount of resources they have access to, and their battle with corporations to keep environments inhabitable. I learned a lot about what makes competition fun and how to keep action engaging by adding elements that force player decisions and by making players’ goals sometimes compete. Watching other people play our game made me excited and felt like when I would run a program for the first time and sometimes it wouldn’t work but I would have to watch it finish to figure out what was wrong with it.
