My family has never been much for games. Growing up, we occasionally played Monopoly, or even less occasionally, Scrabble or other games.
I remember we had a gardening-themed game missing either some elements or the instructions, and no one went out of their way to figure out how to play it.
As an adult, I dread the process of learning a new game, but once I do I usually really enjoy it. I can often drag my family along for the ride.
Lately, my daughter and I have been playing just one game — a card game called Ecologies, which was a birthday present from a friend. The goal of the game is to build healthy ecologies using a variety of cards with different elements of nature on them.
On each turn a player draws cards, can trade with other players, plays two moves and can discard four cards in exchange for one extra card. To open an ecology, a player must play a biome card — there are several biomes: tundra, marine, coniferous forest, temperate forest, desert and tropics.
Next, a player must add a producer card. Producers are plants that use sunlight to grow and make food for creatures within the biome. Producers include blackberries in the temperate forest and phytoplankton in the marine biome.
Then players can add different levels of creatures. Each must be able to eat a card placed below it, and many can be eaten by cards placed above them. Each biome has a wide range of these cards.
Players create healthy ecologies by also placing a decomposer card, such as mushrooms, slugs, lichen or an animal that eats decaying biomass such as polar bears, coyotes and wolverines.
Many cards can be moved around in a biome to play different roles. Once a player has a certain number of cards and roles filled in a biome, they achieve a “healthy ecology bonus,” which ranges from bonus points to destroying a card in an opponent’s ecology every other turn.
There are also biotic and abiotic cards that offer a variety of plays; one is a viral infection that causes all players to discard down to five cards. Another offers healthy competition within an ecology, for an extra two points. Others allow a player to destroy a producer on another player’s ecology.
If that ecology has just one producer, all the organisms above it collapse and that ecology is destroyed.
Each card has a nice illustration of the organism or biome, a number and letter indication of where it falls and info about what it eats and what it is eaten by.
We’ve been enjoying this game because it is both fun and educational, while being slow and not overly competitive. Although my daughter doesn’t take time to read about each element, I’ve noticed her understanding of the layers of our environment is already starting to sink in.
This game, unlike others we’ve tried, is interesting both for my kiddo and for me (I quickly tired of the Angelina Ballerina game, and of several others we played a few times).
Over the years my family sporadically has enjoyed Ligretto, a fast and very competitive German card game. Some of us loved it — to the exhaustion point where several friends and family members finally refused to play it any longer.
When we get tired of this game, I will look for another sneakily educational game, so we don’t strain relationships by sliding back into our obsession for playing Ligretto over and over.
ALDONA BIRD is a journalist, previously writing for The Dominion Post. She uses experience gained working on organic farms in Europe to help her explore possibilities of local productivity and sustainable living in Preston County.
