Six Games You Should Play to Celebrate Earth Day!

Today is Earth Day and the staff at Engaged Family Gaming wants to share some games you can play to celebrate! Below are our picks for board games (and a video game) to play today (or any day) that will help you learn about, cherish, or save the only home we have ever known.

EcoFluxx

The Fluxx series of card games, by Looney Labs, provides a pretty simple set of rules: The cards are the rules. The games start with a draw-one, play-one rule, but new rule cards can be played to change that, goal cards can change the victory conditions, and players get “Keeper” cards that help them reach the goal conditions. EcoFluxx is fast (5-20 minutes) and chaotic, with ever changing rules and win conditions, but great silly fun for the family. Lots of themes are available for the game, but the Eco theme is the perfect fit for your Earth Day game table.

Takenoko

Takenoko is a gorgeous looking game that puts players in charge of a shared Japanese bamboo garden. Players work to complete individual goals, either by building out the colored, hex-shaped tiles into a certain layout, moving the gardener to encourage the gardens to grow a certain amount of bamboo, or moving the adorable panda figure to eat a certain amount of bamboo shoots. Multiple concurrent goals allow players lots of choice in how to score points, and the brightly colored and beautiful components will keep interest for both kids and adults alike. This gardening game is fast becoming a staff favorite.

CO2

Perhaps the most directly Eco-conscious game on the list, CO2 is a complex combination of worker placement, area control, and economic development game mechanics. Players take control of fictional corporations, building power plants, attempting to leverage green technologies and overall reduce CO2 emissions while still remaining profitable. The game certainly falls on the more fiddly, complex side of the fence, but for those with families comfortable with Euro or worker-placement style games, CO2 provides some deep (and green!) gameplay

Koi Pond: A Coy Card Game

Koi Pond is a card game we haven’t talked much about on Engaged Family Gaming before. In it, players compete to create the most beautiful Koi Pond they can by collecting numbered fish cards (which are gorgeous by the way) and place them either in your public pond or private home.This gorgeous, set collecting game is fun to play, but requires a small amount of bluffing since you have hidden cards.

Flower

Flower, by That Game Company, is the only video game to grace our list today. The reason? It was simply too beautiful to leave out. This is a game where players control a cluster of flower petals as they are blown by the breeze around a number of beautiful environments. The story is told without words, but it is a wonderful allegory about the destruction of nature by our industrialized society.