Ecosia: the board game

The sustainable game that teaches about reforesting
gamesfortrees/ecosia-board-game

Ecosia Board Game

About

Ecosia: the board game is the fun co-op board game that you probably already own!

Based on the popular game about colonialism and resource extraction Settlers of Catan, we’ve re-imagined what living in the island of Catan could be like if humans and nature could co-exist.

This game was developed by a group of board game fans at Ecosia with a multitude of skills, but more importantly a love for trees, nature and the environment. It features a mix of strategy and luck. If you decide to give it a try, we would love to hear back from you over on our Github page.

Players: 1-6 (ideally 4) Duration: 30-40 minutes

Materials needed

Part of the idea of a sustainable board game is to avoid having to buy a new game. We encourage you to repurpose the cards and pieces from Catan and other games, but you can also print our custom-made card deck. To play Ecosia: the board game you will need:

Ecosia Board Game

Game Components

Ecosia Board Game

The board

The game uses a regular Catan board. There are 6 types of tiles, plus the ocean:

The trees

There are different species of trees that can be planted. The game requires 3 species of trees. What the species are is not relevant for the gameplay, just the potential diversity. If you want to get inspired, check out Ecosia’s blog and see which species are planted on which project.

For the purpose of this game, the tree pieces are an unlimited resource. You should be good with 15-20 of each type, but feel free to use any suitable replacement if run out. Tree pieces are also called “tree units” throughout the rulebook.

You can use cubes of 3 different colors or 3 kinds of meeple from other games. You can also create your own tree tokens out of clay or simply use the streets and cities of Catan to represent trees.

First player token

To make it clearer who the first player is, you can use any small object you have around. This will switch between players on each round. You can use the robbers figurine for this purpose.

Forest management deck

This card deck consists of the actions the players can play to protect and grow the forests of Catan. It contains 6 types of actions. The amount of each card depends on the number of players - see Setup for more detailed instructions.

We have created a custom deck that you can print. Alternatively, you can reuse Catan’s resource and development cards for this purpose.

Catan Card Meaning
🐑 Sheep 🌱 Nursery
🪵 Wood 🌳 Plant
🌾 Wheat 🤲 Prune
🧱 Brick 💞 Natural reforestation
🗻 Rock 💧 Reforestation
🐴 Knight 👩‍🌾 Agroforestry

🌱 Nursery

Place 3 trees in any nurseries of your choice. You may distribute these trees across multiple nurseries and mix different species as you see fit.

📚 Finding and growing seedlings is one of the bottlenecks of planting trees, nurseries are important to overcome this problem.

🌳 Plant

Plant a tree on a any eligible tile from a selected nursery, except on a deforested area. The tree must originate from a nursery that is connected to that tile (see Connected Tiles).

📚 Planting trees is one of the best ways to reforest the planet and fight climate change.

🤲 Prune

To a tile of your choice, add a tree unit of a species already planted there. This tree should come from your reserve (not from a nursery).

📚 Pruning makes trees grow bigger and healthier, which is important to be the most efficient we can when generating biomass, which in turn captures more co2.

💞 Natural reforestation

Add a tree between two tiles where that species is already planted. This tree unit should come from your reserve (not from a nursery).

The following graphic illustrates the valid reforestation positions.

Natural reforestation example

📚 To facilitate tree monitoring, we plant threes in lines. This way we can easily identify that trees that appear “outside the line” have been seeded naturally.

👩‍🌾 Agroforestry

Increase tree diversity on a farmland to create a productive system that mimics nature:

  1. Select one tree from a nursery connected to a farmland tile (see Connected Tiles under Concepts).
  2. Plant this tree in the chosen farmland tile, ensuring no other tree of the same species is already present.
  3. After planting, add 2 trees of any species to the nursery from which you took the tree.

📚 These productive systems require less maintainability. The trees need to be complementary to each other, for example occupying different layers of the forest. This means a much higher profit margin that supports villages in developing countries. Ecosia does this for many of the projects ensuring that trees have a high survival rate.

💧 Reforestation

Bring life back to one deforested area of your choosing by planting different trees from connected nurseries in it (see Connected Tiles).

  1. Calculate the total number of trees already planted in the tiles surrounding the deforested area. Ensure this number meets or exceeds the value shown on the deforested area’s number token. If not, you cannot proceed with reforestation.
  2. If condition 1 is satisfied, you need to plant trees in that deforested area equal to half of the number on the deforested area’s number token (rounded down).
  3. You can choose trees from different nurseries connected to the deforested area to fulfill the planting requirement.
  4. If you do not have enough trees to plant, you also cannot proceed with reforestation.
  5. If the reforested tile is facing down, flip it back and discard the number token.

📚 To reforest areas that have scarce rains, we use the Half Moon technique, where we dig half moon shaped holes and plant the trees inside it so that more water is retained when it does rain.

If you want to make this event harder and more realistic, because the growing conditions in deforested areas are so harsh:

Event deck

This deck consists of the possible damaging events that affect the trees, potentially causing more deforestation. Most times this affects tiles closest to the current starting player for that round.

♻️ For this deck you will need 6 types of actions and two cards of each type. Your can print our custom event deck, or you can use cards some a standard deck, for example:

♠️♥️ Card ♦️♣️ Meaning
Ace 🏜 Deforestation
Two 🚜 Encroaching
Three 🌊 Heavy rain
Jack 🔥 Wildfire
Queen 🦠 Pest
King ♨️ Drought

🏜 Deforestation

The highest-numbered deforested area will try to expand:

  1. Randomly decide to which side it will expand to, you can for example assign one number to each side and roll a D6. Feel free to use alternative methods like spin the bottle.
  2. All trees of the dominant species in that tile are killed. If there is a tie, the players need to choose which one of the tied species to get killed.
  3. If there are no trees left after removing the trees in that tile (even if none were killed), it becomes a deforested area. Turn over that tile to signalize it.
  4. Get a random number from the numbers bag and put it on that tile.

📚One of the worst effects of climate change is higher temperatures, making it harder for trees to survive.

🚜 Encroaching

The farmlands want to expand. For each farmland tile, destroy all trees of one species. If there are multiple species present, players choose which species to remove. If there are any empty farmland tiles after that, encroaching happens. If multiple tiles are empty, do it only for the one closest to the player.

  1. Identify the farmland tile closest to the starting player that currently has no trees.
  2. Choose an adjacent tile (not another farmland) for the expansion. If there were any trees on the chosen tile, remove them.
  3. Remove the adjacent tile and move the farmland tile there.
  4. Flip over the removed adjacent tile and place it on the place where the farmland previously was. This is now a deforested area and you need to assign it a number like described above on Deforestation.

📚 Human civilization continuously deforests areas to use as farmland. This is especially a big problem for monoculture plantations, since the quality of the soil after harvesting is so bad that it is much cheaper to just move to a different area instead of planting again, causing more deforestation.

🌊 Heavy rain

Add 1 tree to one tile surrounding each water spring tile. You don’t need to use trees from nurseries and can choose the tile and species you plant. Then run the Deforestation event.

📚 Climate change increases the amount and intensity of rains, flooding susceptible areas. This suffocates trees, but also is a problem for many people living in affected areas. Heavy rain also causes erosion, which trees can help prevent by increasing the retention of water and nutrients.

🔥 Wildfire

In the dry land tile closest to the player, a fire starts. All trees in Monoculture (see monoculture under concepts) in that tile and in the adjacent tile, die. If one or more adjacent tiles are empty after this (even if no trees were killed), players have to choose one of them to become deforested, assign a number to it as well.

📚 As a result of climate change, many areas are drier and much more susceptible to wildfires. Forest fires are also unfortunately used as deforestation techniques by humans and often grow out of control and become wildfire.

🦠 Pest

Find the tile with a Monoculture (see monoculture) closest to the player. Then, on all tiles on the board, reduce the number of trees of that species by 1.

📚 Less diversity, which is usually caused by humans, makes forests much more susceptible to pests, such as bugs or diseases, that proliferate and devastate the environment.

♨️ Drought

Remove 1 tree from 1 spring tile; then for each spring tile without any trees, remove one tree from one adjacent tile. If one or more tiles are empty after this (even if no trees were killed), players have to choose one of them to become deforested, assign a number to it as well.

📚 Deforestation drastically changes rain patterns, causing drought in many areas affecting water availability for trees.

Concepts

Starting Player

Every round a new player starts the round. For that roun they are the starting player. After the event card is drawn, the player on the left of the starting player starts a new round.

Player’s hand

A player always has three cards that compose their hand. Those are the played cards on their turn. They are public and can be visible to other players.

Connected tiles

Connected tiles are tiles adjacent to each other that have at least one tree planted on them. There is no limit to how many tiles can be connected.

A nursery is connected to a tile if it can reach

Deforested area

A deforested area is a specific area where no trees can be planted until it is reforested (see Reforestation development card). At the start of the game, this is only the desert tile, but other tiles can become deforested areas and this would be symbolized by turning them over.

Dominant species

The species that has the most units in a tile. If tied, there is no dominant species.

Monoculture

A monoculture is a tile with a single species of tree present or a dominant species that has more than double the units than other species combined. A tile is still a monoculture even if only one unit is present.

The nursery

Seedling production is a bottleneck for reforestation projects. In the game, nurseries are located on each of the ports drawn on the map. This is where the seedlings will stay until it is time to plant them. A player can only plant trees in tiles adjacent to nurseries or adjacent to tiles that already have trees and are connected to the nursery holding the seedlings to be planted.

Setup

  1. Lay out the different terrain hexes randomly, but keep the desert in the center of the board.
  2. Place the surrounding ocean pieces around the tiles just like you would for Catan (there are numbers that indicate how they fit together around the map).
  3. Place the number 12 token on the deforested area in the middle. Place all the other numbers in the bag.

  4. Prepare the forest management deck. The amount of cards of each type depends on the player count:

    Players Cards of each type
    6 14 cards
    5 12 cards
    4 10 cards
    3 8 cards
    2 6 cards
    1 5 cards

    ℹ️ There should be fewer reforestation cards; take out as many reforestation cards as there are payers.

  5. To prepare the event card deck, draw 10 random event cards and place them in the middle of the table with the face turned down.
  6. Place one random tree species in each Forest tile.
  7. Place one random tree species in each Nursery.
  8. Leave the rest of the tree pieces next to the board grouped by the different species. This is what is called your Reserve.
  9. Each player draws 3 cards from the deck to make up their initial hand. You can choose to play with an open hand.
  10. The player who last used Ecosia goes first.

Gameplay

Beginning with the starting player and proceeding clockwise around the table, players will take turns playing forest management cards to plant or propagate trees.

  1. First the active player can either:
    • Play a card from their hand, apply its effect and then discard it
    • Discard one or all of their cards
  2. Then, draw cards until they have 3 cards in their hand

At the end of each round, an event card is revealed, with potentially damaging effects to the trees and the environment. The length of a round depends on the number of players.

1 player 3 plays/turn
2 players 2 plays/turn
3-4 players 1 play/turn
5-6 players 1 turn every 4 plays

The starting player reveals the next event card, applies its effects, and discards the event card. The first-player token is passed to the next player and a new round starts.

Game End

If the players are able to eliminate all deforested areas, the game is won. However, they must do so before the 10 events occur. After the 10th event occurs, the players may continue for one last round. If there are still any outstanding deforested areas in Catan, the game is lost.

Scoring

Players can calculate how well they did if they win the game. The scoring system is based on how many tons of CO2 the reforested areas will sequester in a year. Each tree unit placed on the board represents 1 hectare of planted forest. More tree units at the end of the game increase the CO2 sequestering capacity.

Biodiverse forests sequester more CO2 than monocultures over time, therefore tiles containing more biodiversity will score higher. Use the table below to calculate the final score:

Biodiversity level CO2 sequestering capacity Point per tree unit
Monoculture tile 5 - 20 tons of CO2 per year 1 points
2 species and no monoculture 10 - 20 tons of CO2 per year 2 points
3 species and no monoculture 10 - 30 tons of CO2 per year 3 points

Feedback

We are still play-testing this game, and actively looking for ways to make it more fun and challenging. If you try it out, we would love to hear back from you. The best way to get in contact is via Github Discussions