Theme: Ecology

In the tile-laying game Click A Tree, players embody Ghanaian farmers. They have adapted to climatic conditions and learned to make use of their surroundings, planting their crops in the shade of trees. In this game, you want to plant trees in a strategic arrangement, deploy your harvest workers skillfully, and reap the most harvest.

To set up, randomly draw nine of fifteen tasks; each player places the matching task strips in the empty spaces at the top of their player board, then places seven fruit markers on level 1 of their board. Each player shuffles their fourteen harvest tiles and reveals two of them. Place the seven fruit markers in a circle, then place a random landscape tile between each pair of markers to form the market. Each tile shows one of six trees, one or two fruit types, and either A, B, or AB. Each player starts with a random landscape tile in front of them.

On a turn, choose a fruit marker on your player board, lower it by one space, then collect the two landscape tiles surrounding this marker in the market. Add these tiles to your board, then choose one of your face-up harvest tiles and add it to your forest. Each sickle on the harvest tile adjacent to a landscape tile earns you one fruit of that type for each tile in that fruit group, e.g., placing a sickle next to avocados in a connected group of four tiles will raise your avocado marker four spaces on your player board.

Except sometimes it won't. A fruit marker can't rise to level 2 until you complete a task and remove that strip from your board. To complete a task, you need to arrange trees of the same type in specific configurations, or create a long line of trees, or connect trees with the same letter, or use harvest tiles in defined ways. Whenever you complete a task, you remove that strip, then push all remaining tasks up, giving your fruit markers room to move up.

You also harvest fruit when you place a landscape tile next to a sickle already in play. When all sickles on a harvest have been used, that tile is fulfilled, which lets you lower a number marker on your player board. When enough of your fruit markers move past a number marker — e.g., two past the 2 near the top of the player board, five past the 5, or all seven past the 7 — the game ends at the end of that round. If only one player has triggered the end of the game, they win; if multiple players have, they sum the value of their fruit to determine a winner.

Rewild: South America is a unique, medium-weight, card-driven, engine-building board game for nature enthusiasts with a heart for wildlife that can be enjoyed in 45-60 minutes.

The thematic focus of Rewild is on the fauna and flora of the South American ecoregions Caatinga, Gran Chaco, Cerrado, Pantanal, Amazon rainforest and Atlantic rainforest. These 6 ecoregions and all their inhabitants exhibit diverse interrelationships and dependencies. One of the core concerns of game author Bruno Liguori Sia, who lives in Brazil himself, was to depict and convey this complex network in a game.

In terms of game mechanics, Rewild has a straightforward foundation. On their turn, each player plays a card and chooses one of two depicted actions. After carrying out this action, the player can attract animals and plants on display to their ecosystem. As soon as a player has 8 (or 9) face-up animal cards in front of them, the end of the game is triggered.

However, you shouldn't be fooled by this essentially simple basis, as every game of Rewild features countless decisions and plays differently every time due to the enormous variety of cards. Questions that players are faced with include:
How do I generate enough resources (water, minerals, seeds) to expand my ecosystem? Where do I place which biomes so that their effects optimally promote the expansion of my ecosystem? Do I focus on one biome or several? Would it make sense to upgrade my existing biomes?
When do I get all my action cards back into my hand to have more options and resources available again? Do I do this once, twice or even three times and what are my opponents planning? Will I still have enough time to play all my cards in time for them to count towards the effects of my animal cards?
Which animal and plant cards do I bring into my ecosystem to create an optimally linked ecosystem that generates as many victory points as possible? Are there any cards with immediate effects that would be interesting for a retrigger? Do I keep an animal species until the end, or do I immediately generate points by making it the target of a predator?
The player who best answers and masters all these questions in a game of Rewild receives the most victory points and wins the game.

Step into a world of wonder and natural splendor with HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest, an immersive family game inspired by the Indonesian word for rainforest.

In HUTAN, all players have their own rainforest patch where they will plant sprouts and flowers that over time grow into towering trees. When a habitat is created, an iconic forest animal arrives: the orangutan, the sumatran tiger, the rhinoceros hornbill, the cassowary, or the sumatran rhino.

HUTAN plays over nine rounds, and all players have two turns each round. On your turn, you take a flower card from the shared market pool and place the flowers into your rainforest. If you place a flower on top of a matching flower, you grow a tree. When an area is completed with trees, the last tree is replaced by an animal.

At the end of the game, the player who grew the best rainforest and attracted the most animals will score the most points and win.

—description from the publisher

Plunge into the modern era, where our planet's vast interconnected ocean scape is one of the last frontiers to discover and explore. Experience a deep new ever-changing adventure in this followup to the smash hit Endeavor: Age of Sail!

In Endeavor: Deep Sea, you head an independent research institute with the goal of developing sustainable projects and preserving the fragile balance of marine life. Throughout the game, you’ll recruit field experts and use their abilities to explore new locations, research dive sites, publish critical ecological papers, and launch conservation efforts.

Expand your expertise, develop your team, and learn as much as possible about the sea. The action your institute takes now, could mean a healthy ocean and a sustainable future for the planet.

Endeavor: Deep Sea is designed by Jarratt Gray and Carl de Visser, the same creative team behind the smash hit Endeavor: Age of Sail. This edition is set in a new era of nautical discovery, but uses streamlined rules which will be familiar to fans of the original game.

—description from the publisher

The Atiwa Range is a region of southeastern Ghana in Africa consisting of steep-sided hills with rather flat summits. A large portion of the range comprises an evergreen forest reserve, which is home to many endangered species. However, logging and hunting for bushmeat, as well as mining for gold and bauxite, are putting the reserve under a lot of pressure.

Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Kibi, the mayor is causing a stir by giving shelter to a large number of fruit bats in his own garden. This man has recognized the great value the animals have in deforested regions of our planet: Fruit bats sleep during the day and take off at sunset in search of food, looking for suitable fruit trees up to sixty miles away. They excrete the seeds of the consumed fruit, disseminating them across large areas as they fly home. A single colony of 150,000 fruit bats can reforest an area of up to two thousand acres a year.

Just like that mayor, in Atiwa, you know that fruit bats — once scorned and hunted as mere fruit thieves — are in fact incredibly useful animals, spreading seeds over large areas of the country. By doing so, they help to reforest fallow land and, in the medium term, improve harvests. This realization has led to a symbiotic co-operation between fruit bats and fruit farmers. The animals are kept as "pets" to increase the size of fruit farms more quickly. Tall trees are left as roosts, providing shelter for them rather than hunting them for their scant meat. However, if you have a lot of fruit bats, you need a lot of space...

In the game, you will develop a small community near the Atiwa Range, creating housing for new families and sharing your newly gained knowledge on the negative effects of mining and the importance that the fruit bats have for the environment. You must acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and make your community prosper. The player who best balances the needs of their community and the environment wins.