Ecocentricity Blog: Tabletop Forestry

Y’all, toddler sleep regression is tough. My 2-year-old daughter is going through a bad bout of it right now, so I’m currently running on 4.5 hours of sleep. The fact that these sentences are intelligible means that Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checks are still working.

I’m going to take it easy on myself this week and hammer out a quick post. So for this week, I want to put a plug in for a board game that I played with my wife on Father’s Day. And as always, I don’t do paid endorsements – this is just something I thought was cool!

Photosynthesis is a 2017 strategy board game by Blue Orange Games. In it, two to four players compete by growing trees from seedlings to maturity, all while strategically positioning the placement of their trees to catch sunlight and avoid shade from other trees. Growing trees all the way to maturity earns you victory points, and whoever has the most points at the end of three rounds wins.

It’s a well-designed game – easy to learn, while still having multiple layers of strategy. Chantel ended up crushing me in our inaugural play-through, as she had a better intuitive grasp of how to plan for future turns (a critical skill in the game). We both had fun, but what I’m most excited for is when I can play this with my kids (admittedly a few years down the road). Thematically, it’s brilliant. I will be able to use it as a teaching tool when explaining photosynthesis as a biological phenomenon. They’ll also see the full lifecycle of trees from seedlings to eventual death and understand how an entire forest can arise from planting just a few trees.

For a board game enthusiast who doubles as an environmentalist, Photosynthesis is as on-brand for me as it gets!

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