Elizabeth Hargrave has found various way to introduce scientific principle in her board games, creating sound game designs that rely on their accurate parallels with real life as they do on a good concept from beginning-to-end. Wingspan’s creator new game, Undergrove, is her latest take on the tabletop hobby in which players start as a Douglas-fir tree which try to build a symbiotic relationship with fungi and use them to establish the tree’s seedlings.
The game is based on the fact that for more than 300 million years, tree have traded nutrients with fungi in what is a vast underground network which has baffled scientists and excited them to continue probing and understanding how this hidden world works. Now, this fascinating concept is brought closer to us as well, as we seek to play a rewarding and educational game that teachers a fair bit about the environment.
Undergrove is described as a medium-weight 3X in which you try to spread your seedlings far and wide and build a symbiotic relationship with the fungi which help you derive nutrients and resources to spur growth. There is a shared forest area in which players add more mushrooms and exploit their relationships between the seedlings and mushrooms to accumulate more resources.
Players also help seedlings grow into trees by moving the resources through the fungi and at the end of the game, the player who has the best set of seedlings and the best symbiotic relationship is the winner of the experience.
The game is developed in collaboration with Mark Wotton who Hargrave worked with to create Mariposas. Hargrave is perhaps best known for Wingspan, but she has also created and built other worthwhile titles, including Tussie-Mussie and The Fox Experiment. Undergrove plays for 2-4 players in 60-75 minutes and is fit for ages 14+. Wingspan is featured as one of the best family board games to try.