Elizabeth Hargrave, designer of Wingspan, discusses her passion and process behind her new game Mariposas.
Unfiltered Gamer:
What have you been doing with yourself the last few months as the world has kinda been on lockdown?
Elizabeth Hargrave:
I feel like a week or two ago D.C. had the highest COVID rate in the country, I’m in the D.C. suburbs. Our county has apparently hit all the metrics they think they can start opening things next week. Still distant but more things open. I work from home anyway.
UG:
For those who aren’t familiar with you on a personal level – tell me a little about yourself.
EH:
I live just out side of Washington, D.C. I originally moved here to work for the government. I worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And then I actually worked on Capital Hill for several years. And then I went into consulting for awhile all in health care policy. I started playing hobby board games in about 2005. I was actually on a retreat with my unitarian church. Someone brought a bunch of board games. In that weekend I ended up playing Carcassonne and Blokus and Catan. But yeah, I was totally hooked. I had always played a lot of card games and Scrabble … bridge in college.
UG:
I can’t really properly interview you without at least touching on the success of Wingspan. Talk briefly about the success of Wingspan and its impact on the board game culture as a whole.
EH:
So we’re over a year after it came out and still every print run sells out before the next one arrives. Which, as well as it did in 2019, I don’t think we could have predicted that we would still be in this spot over a year later. So that’s kind of amazing. I think part of why it’s taken the board gaming world by storm… part of that is that is has broken out of the board gaming world. It got a lot of attention from birders. It’s got mainstream press attention. It’s been in the New York Times, it’s been on NPR a couple times on different shows. It got reviews in SCIENCE and NATURE which are major scientific journals. So it really broke out of the board game hobby media world into mainstream media in a way — I can’t think of another game that’s done that. Evolution got some of the same attention from the science press because they’re doing fun stuff that echos that scientific process. And I think that that piece of Wingspan though echoing actual bird behaviors – some of the actions – having so much factual information in a game resonates with people.
I think a lot of people even if they don’t actively consider themselves birders, they do have a certain level of connection to birds. Their just an interesting thing to watch and a lot of people grew up with a bird feeder or some memory of someone in their family enjoying watching birds casually.
When I pitched to Stonemeir I remember Jamie Stegmaier saying he remembered the bird field guide at his grandma’s house and being fascinated. I think a lot of people have that at some level.
UG:
There is a running theme throughout your games, it’s an obvious love of nature. Where does that love of nature come from?
EH:
I think it comes from my family. I spent elementary school, I lived in Southern Illinois in the country in the woods. My mom was a biology teacher for awhile… super outdoorsy family. As long as I can remember we had bird feeders and we’d go for walks in the woods.
UG:
You’ve got a new game coming out called Mariposas. Tell me a little about the origins of the game – where did the idea come from – and what did the process look like of bringing it to life?
EH:
The game play tells the story of a year of migration in the monarch butterfly which they spend the winter in Central Mexico – very small region in central Mexico – and in the summer will go as far north as southern Canada – which is a pretty amazing distance for this tiny, little creature to cover. Back in 2003 I was down in that part of Mexico and we went to one of those sanctuaries there that have been established to protect. They roost on a very particular 12 mountains that have a particular set of trees and particular climate situation that help them survive the winter. It’s just spectacular! Millions and millions of butterflies. All the monarchs from eastern and north American condensed in this tiny little region in Mexico. Trees look like they’re covered in orange leaves and the butterflies will take flight and you realize every leaf was a butterfly.
Many years later I read a novel by Barbara Kingsolver called Flight Behavior that’s about the monarchs. It imagined in climate change, what if the monarchs started roosting in the Carolina’s in the mountains somewhere and people stumble upon this new grove of wintering Monarchs. It got me thinking about that. At that point I was playing board games. I had already started working on Wingspan a little bit and that really got my brain going what would it look like to portray that whole cycle in a board game. That’s how it started.
I couldn’t really get it to work and so I set it aside and started working on Wingspan pretty intensively. I have trouble working on more than one game at once. It’s very hard for me to move my brain from one thing to the other. I do better when I can focus on one game. So I set the butterflies aside and finished Wingspan. Before Wingspan came out – I finished it in the spring of 2018 – my work was done and it didn’t come out until January 2019. So it was in that time I started working on Mariposas again. AEG put out a call for women designers to submit games to them because they wanted to feature some different designers. Up until that time they only included men. Before that round, I guess… last year they did put out Point Salad which has a woman on the team that designed it. I submitted Mariposas to them before Wingspan came out in November and heard back from them right about the time Wingspan was coming out – that they were interested in it. That had planned for this in their timeline that they wanted the games pitched at the end of 2018 to be in their lineup for GenCon 2020. So they built in a nice chunk of time to do all the development and art. They hooked me up with a developer on their staff named Mark Wooten who happens to be a former park ranger from the U.K. He totally got what I was trying to do. He jumped in and we were so much on the same page telling the story with love and accuracy. So it was really fun to work with him – he really polished things up.
UG:
It sounds like you had plenty of time to develop it. Was that extended timeframe better for the game or worse. Toiling on something too long can get you lost in the weeds.
EH:
When I sent it to AEG in my cover I said: Sending what I have now, not 100% done, but the core of it is really good. There was a deadline I had to send it in by.
You play over 3 rounds which are sorta spring, summer, fall. The rounds each have a card that says “This round your goal is this” – you get points for doing these things. So there is a bunch of those for each round. The game play can be really different from round to round depending on what you’re trying to do – game to game. We ended up adding a whole other layer of set collection into the game where you’re picking up little tokens at different cities which I think really ads another layer, path to earning points and interesting decisions. It was definitely improved in development.
UG:
How is Mariposas going to connect with people on that emotional level?
EH:
I think people like butterflies in the way people like birds. The theme is pretty enjoyable. The story of the monarchs is an amazing story and I don’t think everything knows it. It’s really fun to me to show people things they might not know about the world – that feeling of discovery. Something I did not know about and I learned about it because of this game – thats a great feeling.
UG:
Tell me a little more about the objectives and game play.
EH:
The basic way that you play is that you have 2 movement cards at any given time. You’re choosing one and you’re playing it. It took a lot of refining (this was even before I pitched it) to get to that point to realize how simple I could get away with making that decision and still be an incredibly interesting decision – giving people more choices than that was overwhelming for a lot of players because its on a hex matte. The map itself gives them so many options that you don’t need a lot of choices in your hand. The core of the game: You’re just making decisions to move across the board and pick up flowers and the flowers become the set collection – you’re collecting the flowers to make more butterflies and get them out on the board in your color. There are actually 4 generations in the game. There are 4 generations of monarchs in a year – so the butterflies that fly back to Mexico in the fall are the great-grandchildren of the butterflies that originally flew up north in the spring. None of them make the full trip, yet somehow they knew how to do it. You actually see that in the game. I really like that we were able to work that in to the game. The whole feel of the butterflies moving around the map looks to me like you can see the animated maps of how the migration works – where butterflies go. The gameplay to me looks like the map and how the actual migration works in that it’s very organic. We’re giving people the goals at the end of the round to do things and because people have those goals the butterflies just naturally move in the ways that mimic nature. Which I just find so pleasing. I was really happy to be able to figure that out.
UG:
What are some things you applied or learned from past design experience you applied to Mariposas?
EH:
It definitely went faster. I started this game years before and had set it aside. When I picked it back up, it’s a little hard to articulate, but really clarifying decisions and giving people the right amount of decisions to make so that every turn is interesting but not overwhelming. I think I had a much better intuitive sense for what the right level is and how to get to that level much more quickly. With Mariposas I was aiming a bit lighter because I think the theme will appeal to a lot of families. By this time I definitely had a much more formalized play testing process – so a lot of it is my process. When I first started working on Wingspan I did not know anyone else that was a game designer. So I began play testing by playing a game against myself and then my spouse and then friends and family. I eventually made it out to different play testing events. At the end of Wingspan I had hooked up with more great designers in D.C. including Matthew O’Malley (Between Two Cities, The Search for Planet X). We started play testing once a week together and whoever else we could rope in with us. More recently, but after Wingspan, Dominic Crapuchettese (Evolution, Say Anything). David Turczi, who works for the Automa Factory who ended up doing the solo version of Wingspan – he was a regular play tester with us before it was ready for the Automa to be designed. So starting on Mariposas was just hitting the ground running. I have so many resources now in the design community – it has been such an asset. Finding thoughtful play testers is definitely one of the hardest things when designing a game. With designers, you’re giving them as much as they’re giving you because you’re trading play testing – you’re not going to burn them out in the same way you would burn out your friends if you make them play your game too much. They’re thinking about how games work structurally and can say I think this isn’t working because of X. When you play test with friends they’re like “Oh! You made a thing. It’s amazing!”
UG:
The rule book advocates for the Monarch and some of the challenges they face in the world today. Talk a little about the declining population of Monarchs.
EH:
The monarch population is definitely suffering through a combination of factors. The region in Mexico where the monarchs migrate to has been declared a biosphere. They have been getting a lot of pressure from logging – illegal poaching of the trees and a scary amount of lawless such as narco trafficking having effected the ability of the police to protect these areas. We saw two people die this past winter. One was a former logger who has become involved in the butterfly sanctuary and who was now working against logging. The other was a guy who worked at the butterfly sanctuary and it is unclear that the police are going to do anything about it. It’s tragic. There has also been a lot of issues with habitat loss in the north. Monarchs can only reproduce on milkweed plants. Farmers have increased their use of herbicides to prepare their land for crops and those herbicides are killing a lot of the milkweed as well. The government has been working with power companies to manage power line cuts in a way that preserves the plant life in these areas that will encourage milkweed and other native plants. Hopefully that will help the Monarch population.
UG:
What’s the next mountain to climb after Mariposas?
EH:
Good Question. We just wrapped up the next expansion for Wingspan. That should hopefully be out by the end of 2020. I’m not sure after that. I’ve got a few things… but it’s been really hard to do creative work during the pandemic so I’ve been trying not to push it.
