Occupation: Farmer

Click A Tree

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.

Atiwa

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.

Stardew Valley: The Board Game

A cooperative board game of farming and friendship based on the Stardew Valley video game by Eric Barone. Work together with your fellow farmers to save the Valley from the nefarious JojaMart Corporation! To do this, you'll need to farm, fish, friend and find all kinds of different resources to fulfill your Grandpa's Goals and restore the Community Center. Collect all kinds of items, raise animals, and explore the Mine. Gain powerful upgrades and skills and as the seasons pass see if you're able to protect the magic of Stardew Valley!

The goal of the game is to complete Grandpa's Goals and restore the Community Center, which requires you to gather different types of resources represented by tiles. You have a fixed amount of turns to accomplish this. This is driven by the Season Deck of 20 cards, one of which is drawn each turn to trigger certain events. Cooperatively the players decide each turn where they will focus their individual actions and place their pawn in that part of the Valley. Using their actions, they visit specific locations, trying to gather resources to complete their collective goals. Actions include things like: watering crops, trying to catch fish, rolling dice to explore the mines, and many more. When the Season Deck is exhausted, the game ends.