Elephants & Villages

A Boardgame about Elephant-Human conflict

A game that emulates elephant-human conflict and educates players on strategies for coexistence.

#elephanthumanconflict #boardgamedesign #educationalgame #wildlifeconservationgame

Team

Ashwathy Satheesan in collaboration with Shashank Srinivasan, Technology for Wildlife

Year

2022

“Play isn’t doing what we want, but doing what we can with the materials we find along the way.”
- Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

The connection between play and conservation is the ability to be resourceful and mindful.

What if we could gamify wildlife conservation data to spread the message about how humans and wildlife can coexist in harmony?

Background

The Technology for Wildlife Foundation (TfW) is a non-profit conservation technology organisation whose mission is to amplify conservation impact. The board game was first conceived in 2016 by the TfW team, with the goal of emulating the human-elephant conflict in India. Elephant-human conflict is common in both Asia and Africa, and it occurs when elephants and humans share the same territory. It is a difficult conservation problem because it harms both elephants and humans. The game went through several rounds of iterations before it was introduced to me in 2021. The aim was to refine the game's overall design, conduct expert playtests, and get the game ready for the market.

The idea is to emulate rather than simulate.

The Process

Theme: Decode conservation data to identify key messages to convey through the game. It's what makes the game emotionally appealing.
Mechanics: Construct the game's rules and interaction system. These rules, which include objectives, progression, and opposition, must be consistent with the theme.
Components: Create the game's physicality- cards, dice, boards, and everything else that comes in the box. These must reflect the aesthetics and sentiment that we want to elicit from the theme.

Play test

We ran online trials of the game prior to creating the physical prototype. For over two weeks, we ran the play-test online in Figma with wildlife biologists, ecologists, geographers, and even a climate scientist.

Through these tests, we refined and reinforced the messages we wanted to convey through the play. For instance, one of them represented the actual carrying capacity of our sanctuaries by limiting the number of sanctuaries tiles each player could have. These facts were gamified, prompting players to consider how they could creatively find a workaround to better coexist with wildlife.

We played-tested the game at ATREE's 25th anniversary board-game event in July 2022. ATREE has made significant contributions to the field of conservation, while also pioneering knowledge systems to address complex conservation problems. It was an incredible opportunity to test the game and receive feedback from experts, enthusiasts, and renowned people in the field of wildlife conservation.

Elephants predominantly live in sanctuaries, and villagers depend on their villages and farms. When both parties enter each other's spaces, conflict can arise. In this game, players take on the role of villagers who must guide elephants to their sanctuaries while also protecting their farms.

How can a player ensure that there is minimal conflict and that peace is maintained by strategically planning their moves?

The Game

Players takes turn placing their villages on the board, which are surrounded by farms that earn them a living. Elephants can wander across the board, causing damage to the farm and village pieces if they are not deflected to their sanctuary's pieces using barrier tokens.

With every round, elephants are introduced to the board, and their movements are based on dice throws and card play. To protect their villages and adjacent farms, the players must use strategic barrier token placement or play specific cards. The player who plays the best villager and stays on the board the longest with their farms wins.