You wait all summer for a virtual festival and two happen on the same weekend! In addition to Birdfair, I enjoyed Virtually Expo from the UK Games Expo team last weekend. They made brilliant use of loads of online platforms to provide demos, lectures, live comedy, tournaments, playtesting, vikings, even prize draws so it felt like a pretty good distanced alternative to the real thing. I always keep an eye out for nature-themed games so here’s a round up:
First up was the card game version of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s phenomenon The Lost Words from Kosmos Games. We had a play of this on Tabletopia, which describes itself as an ‘online arena’ that makes tabletop games available digitally. The interface isn’t the best for useability and can be pretty clunky (a misplaced click can mean showing your entire hand to your competitor and the cards end up all higgedly-piggedly like you’ve hit the gin) but we picked up the gameplay quickly enough. I have a feeling the magic of the artwork and poetry will be much more effective in person, but it’s certainly a unique format.
Also available to play via Tabletopia is a beta version of Hexapod: The Curious Pastime of Entomology. It’s a 2-player tile placement game from Wight Hart Games that challenges you to neatly arrange your collection of beetles and moths. We had a lot more fun with this one, there’s not much depth for the entomology geeks but the strategy of matching insects to score points is satisfying.
Hub games were demonstrating the adorable family-friendly Flip Over Frog, for 2-4 players, in which you flip tiles to reveal different coloured amphibians. I discovered this game has been incorporated into gameschooling units too, where kids learn through play, which I’m totally on board with.
I was in danger of judging a game by its box art with Codex Naturalis by Studio Bombyx, it’s so pretty! I didn’t get a chance to play the demo but was intrigued by the prospect of a 2-4 player card placement game themed around the illustration of a medieval bestiary. One to watch out for.
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Since I started high brow, I have to finish with Don’t be a dik dik – a card game from Ginger Fox games that sees 3-6 players tussling over the naughtiest names in nature. If it doesn’t end up in my Christmas stocking I’ll be offended!
Admittedly, a lot of these games will be more fun when we can get back to playing in person. In the meantime, there are digital ways of playing and I’m really thankful Virtually Expo helped me dip a toe into some unknown waters. If you’d like to try playing something online, I’d recommend starting with Board Game Arena. Unlike Tabletopia, each game on BGA has been adapted specifically for online play so they’re generally easier to get to grips with. You can play a lot of the games for free, or premium membership is cheap at €4 a month or €24 for a year. A couple of popular nature-themed options include Coloretto, a card game featuring colour-changing chameleons, or Takenoko, a tile placement game for bamboo farmers and/or panda-lovers. You might not learn heaps on the natural history side of things but they’re certainly fun, and perhaps tying an enjoyable experience to depictions of nature can teach us to value the natural world.