educational

In Forest Shuffle, players compete to gather the most valuable trees, then attract species to these trees, thus creating an ecologically balanced habitat for flora and fauna.

To start, each player has six cards in hand, with cards depicting either a particular type of tree or two forest dwellers (animal, plant, mushroom, etc.), with these latter cards being divided in half, whether vertically or horizontally, with one dweller in each card half.

On a turn, either draw two cards — whether face down from the deck or face up from the clearing — and add them to your hand, or play a card from your hand by paying the cost, then putting it into play.

During set-up, three winter cards were placed into the bottom third of the deck. When the third winter card is drawn, the game ends immediately, then players tally their points based on the trees and dwellers in their forest. Whoever scores the most points wins.

Forest Shuffle is the first in a line of Lookout games sporting the Lookout Greenline label, produced on FSC certified paper and avoiding plastic completely.

Every ecosystem is a complex combination of living organisms and the environment. Even a small change in any element affects the entire system, but balance is usually restored quickly. However, sometimes a random event leads to the butterfly effect – an unpredictable cascade of changes that can completely transform the whole biosphere.

Evolution: New World – Kickstarter Box includes The Butterfly Effect expansion and all additional exclusive and limited content from the crowdfunding campaign.

In the box, you’ll find:

New Evolution and Area cards (including Exclusive Promo cards, alt-art cards and foil cards). Add more gameplay depth and create dynamic survival strategies for your animals.
The Solo mode. In the Alien World scenario you will fight 1 on 1 against the merciless Dominator and insatiable Devastator for supremacy or create your own monsters to compete with.
Additional tokens. With the expansion, up to 6 players can enjoy Evolution together.
Butterfly Effect scenario. Start a chain reaction of random events that affect the game’s course and change the evolutionary process.
Exclusive non-gameplay components (sticker pack, metal pin).

—description from the publisher

Disparity Trap: The Socially Conscious Board Game provides an easy way to have the hard conversations around race & privilege in America and how they impact society in systemically dominant (SD) and systemically non-dominant (SND) ways. The game play is like many of its kind, where your individual goal is to accrue as much wealth as possible.

But where it differs is that you can have a team goal as well where you work with your fellow players to dismantle the Disparity Traps seeking to keep everyone in poverty. Within this game you also step into someone else’s shoes; to experience the disparities within an identity different from your own. Throughout the game, the dice roll correlates your identity in the game to real life statistics.

So like life, the dice are in your “hands,” but the odds are not.

—description from the designer

In this third expansion to Wingspan, we welcome new species to our habitats by exploring the vibrant, intriguing, and magnificent birds of Asia. These birds were chosen from the over 2,800 species that live in Asia.

Wingspan Asia is several different things: A stand-alone game for 1 player or 2 players (Duet mode that can be used with any bird/bonus cards), a card expansion to the original Wingspan (any bird/bonus cards across any Wingspan game or expansion can be combined), and a 6-7 player expansion via the new Flock mode (for which the player components from the core game are necessary).

—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.