Board Game Hotness from the SPIEL Games Fair 2023: Nature Calls

As we move into 2024, it’s the ideal time to look back on what the past year has brought us, and if we want to get a snapshot of what the freshness in boardgames is each year then there is no better place to look than at SPIEL, the annual board game convention in Essen, Germany. It is arguably the biggest in the world, and this year it welcomed 193,000 visitors to see some 1,750 games spread across the vastness of 62,500 square metres of hall space.

Having all of these titles in one place can often make it easier to spot trends in board game releases, and this year was no exception. Everyone on the team felt the strongest theme that came across this year was ‘nature’. While there have, of course, always been a smattering of games with nature-based themes, most people would probably point to the massive success of Wingspan, released in 2019, as a turning point. Wingspan features almost 200 different real species of birds, all with amazing realistic artwork, in a well designed strategy game that also manages to be very accessible. Four years later it still sits as the No. 25 ranked boardgame of all time, and has sold over 1 million copies. This taught publishers that games do not need to feature high fantasy, space, war, or Renaissance Europe to sell, and that there was potentially an untapped demand for good looking games that feature plants, animals and all things nature. This has never been more evident than at SPIEL 2023, and so with that in mind let us have a look at some of the finest flora and fauna laden titles that were on offer at the fair.

There seems no better place to start than with Forest Shuffle. Not only does it epitomise the genre, but it was one of the most popular games in the show for the team. The game is made up of over 150 cards covered in realistic and biologically accurate illustrations of trees, birds, butterflies, mammals, mushrooms and more. On your turn you have one of two options: you can draw two cards from the top of the deck or a common face up discard display, or you can play a card. When you play a card it is placed in front of you to build your tableau. Tree cards, of which you will end up with several, form the core building blocks. Other cards are added to the trees, with certain types of cards occupying certain spaces around them. Birds and butterflies sit above trees, mushrooms and some animals live below, and other animals are placed to the side of the trees to signify that they live in the branches or the nearby forest. All the cards you play will have certain scoring criteria. Some may be worth a fixed number of points, some may score for other identical cards in your tableau, or for having other synergising cards, or collecting diverse sets of related cards. Add up your points at game end and see who is the king of the forest.

The game has many things going for it. One is, of course, the art and the skilful melding of theme and function — as you place trees and creatures there is a logic in where they go that is intuitive and satisfying. There are also plenty of meaningful decisions to make. When playing cards you may have to pay a cost by discarding other cards from your hand, which is always agonising, as you usually feel that you don’t want to throw any of them away. It is also a game in which you need to be aware of what your opponents are doing. Is someone else also trying to collect all the different butterflies, or have the most Linden trees? The end game is triggered immediately when a third “Winter Is Coming” card is drawn from the deck, forcing you to make decisions about whether you should push your luck and hold out to pull off that big combo with the cards you are building in your hand, or to just get some points on the table before the game suddenly stops. There are a number of different strategic approaches to the game you can experiment with too, meaning that you will often feel the desire to shuffle up the cards and start again as soon as the scoring is done. 

While Forest Shuffle is at the quick and accessible end of the spectrum, towards the other end of the gaming complexity scale lies Arborea, in which players take on the role of a Patron Spirit, guiding your villagers to heal and grow the landscape around them by sending them on pilgrimages and building your personal Ecosystem. It would be foolish to try and explain the whole game in the space available here, but the heart of the game is worker placement. A lot of the game involves familiar interlocking elements; moving up different tracks to improve end game scoring, building a landscape of Ecosystem cards in your own landscape also for scoring purposes, investing in certain areas of the main board by giving gifts to improve your rewards when your workers visit that part of the board. While this fits together into a pleasing puzzle of optimisation, there are some unique elements in the game that add further interest. Workers are placed on sliding tiles rather than directly on to action spaces. When these tiles are triggered to move forward any player can choose to have their worker jump off onto one of the paths on either side. The longer you wait the better the path will be, but the longer you will then have to wait to get your worker back again. Workers that have stepped on to a path can then be activated on your turn to move through every step of that path gaining the varied rewards for each step along the way. Of course there are many varied paths to choose from across the board, all with different rewards.

Finally, we cannot possibly talk about Arborea without mentioning the distinct art style. It evokes nature, but some kind of 1970s Vaughn Bodē version with vivid purple hued colours and fantastical hippy versions of creatures and landscapes. 

The whole thing all comes together to present an appealing package. None of us really wrapped our heads around it until half way through the first game, but once things start to click it is a satisfying engine with much joy to be derived from pulling the various levers it offers.

While mushrooms certainly pop up in the artwork for Arborea, these fungi firmly take centre stage in Mycelia, in which the aim is to bring the sacred dewdrops from your forest to the Shrine of Life and receive the support of the Forest Goddess. Pretty self explanatory surely? No? Well, on your player board you have a grid of squares of different terrain types, and drewdrops (blue gems) scattered across it. You need to take actions to move these gems across the squares to the ‘exit’ tile, after which you add them to a cardboard tree stump in the middle of the board. When the Tree is full, it is then spun in a rather superfluous but satisfying manner, ejecting the drops from the bottom along with a die which will direct where each player has to reseed some of the drops onto their board. The first player to clear all the drops from their board is the winner. This feat is achieved via card play and more importantly deck building. This is the heart of the game, recruiting new cards with cute mushroom guys on them, and playing them to move gems or to buy even more cards. The deck building is not overly complex but is still satisfying with a variety of different deck construction strategies available. The game flows smoothly and there is pleasing interplay between the puzzle of creating chains of gem movements and the deck building and card play that allows you to do this. When paired together with the charming presentation of the dew drops, the revolving tree stump, and all the cute mushroom people on the cards, I am now regretting not picking this one up at the fair.

Speaking of presentation, a game that you could not walk past without stopping to look at closer was Redwood, even if just to ask ‘How does that work?’. This game can best be described as a wildlife photography simulator. The large circular board depicts five different outdoor terrain types with trees and flowers printed on them, and movable cardboard animals scattered across the landscape. Each player has a model photographer figure they control. On your turn you do two things, move and take a picture. To move you pick one of the available plastic templates, which are generally curves of differing angles and lengths, place it around the base of your miniature and then move your photographer to their new spot at the end of the template. To take a picture you pick one of the shot templates which vary between long narrow cones and wide curving ones, attach it to the base of your photographer, and then spin it until you have lined up the shot you like. You then reconstruct the shot in your personal display using a card to represent the terrain type you were shooting on, with tokens placed on it for the flowers, trees and animals you covered with your shot template. Each round you will take a new picture this way to add to your collection. You score points along the way for meeting specific objectives and then at the end of the game add on further points for your collected trees, flowers and animals as well as other aspects, such as diversity of different animals or matching adjacent terrain types in your tableau. It is a unique concept executed effectively, although it can suffer a little from the issues any game can have where your score can be determined by millimetre precise calls on if something is over a line (mark it zero!).

In Bonsai you are also trying to create a beautiful piece of art, but this time it is by nurturing your own diminutive Japanese tree. Your tree will be made up of hexagonal wood, leaf, flower and fruit tiles. On your turn you choose to either Meditate or Cultivate. If you Meditate then you draw one of the available card and tile combinations. The cards are added to your tableau and among other things can enhance your capacity to store tiles or your ability to place tiles. When you Cultivate you take a number of your stored tiles, as determined by your tableau, and then add them to your tree, obeying specific placement rules. Players take turns to repeat this sequence until the deck runs out, and will then determine who has grown the most stunning bonsai tree. Players may have collected points cards during the game for reaching certain tile targets, for example the first tree with 5 fruit tiles. These points are combined with set end game scoring for each tile type on your tree. All that then remains is to debate if the player who officially won the game actually has the most good looking tree. As should be evident from the description there are definitely decisions to be made, but this is a fairly simple game, generating a lo-fi relaxing experience.

While the above run down includes some of our favourites ranging from brain melting beasts to the relaxing cup of tea companions, there were just too many games to mention that leant heavily into natural world inspired themes. However, brief honourable mentions also need to go to the following SPIEL 2023 releases. The Glade is yet another game in which mushrooms prominently feature, although the main activity involves laying tiles with animal silhouettes on your personal forest board. It is an abstract strategy game with lots of player interaction that makes your head hurt, but in a good way. Planta Nubo is another title that deserves a nod, in which players are planting flowers and trees on their sky island player board, generating green energy and oxygen, and making use of tools and gardenbots. We made the mistake of playing this very late at night on the last day of the fair and trying to learn it from the rulebook as we went. It was well over an hour before we took our first actual turn. While this is more a reflection of our mental capacity at that time, it is another fairly complex, relatively abstract Eurogame with lots of interlocking moving parts, including some satisfying mechanisms in there.

As we draw to a close, what better game to finish off with than one that brings us back full circle to where we started, with Elizabeth Hargrave, the designer who brought us Wingspan and turbo charged the whole nature genre of boardgames. She had a new game at SPIEL in the form of The Fox Experiment. In homage to a real experiment from the 1950s the players are breeding foxes to generate desirable traits. The game not only has a satisfying dice pool building (and rolling of course!) element but even better each new generation of foxes are individually named by the players before being added back into the display for selection the next round. Add on top a tight action selection mechanism and you have a solid mid weight Euro.

So, now that we have digested the releases of 2023 and are into 2024 it is time to start looking at what will show up in Essen this October. What hot new titles and boardgaming trends will emerge this year? If you are not lucky enough to be there in person then check back here this time next year for our thoughts and analysis on SPIEL 2024.