Undergrove is a board game about the mycorrhizal relationships between fungi and trees. The co-designer is Elizabeth Hargrave, who also created Wingspan about birds.
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Undergrove is a board game about the mycorrhizal relationships between fungi and trees. The co-designer is Elizabeth Hargrave, who also created Wingspan about birds.
AEG
In five years, the bird-collecting board game Wingspan sold 2 million copies. In the world of board gaming, that’s a blockbuster hit.
This fall, the game’s creator, Elizabeth Hargrave, is hoping people will fall in love with another icon of the natural world: mushrooms.
Undergrove is co-designed by Hargrave and Mark Wootton and published by Alderac Entertainment Group. The game is a meditation on the mycorrhizal relationships between trees and fungi.
Across 48 hand-painted mushroom tiles, players assume the role of mature Douglas fir trees. Players compete on a cooperative landscape, “partnering” with mushrooms to trade carbon for nutrients.
For over 300 million years, the mycorrhizal network has facilitated the trade of nutrients between fungi and trees. In co-designing Undergrove, Hargrave wanted her game to mirror that real life trading system. “Interacting with that system physically cements it in people’s brain. You’ll never forget it, right?” she said.
A mushroom forager for about 20 years, Hargrave is the current president of the Mycological Association of Washington, DC. It’s maybe for that reason, she and Wooten encourage players to seek out their local mushroom club and to appreciate the network of nutrients moving beneath their feet.
Elizabeth Hargrave and her husband, Matt Cohen, who leads nature walks in the Washington D.C. area with a wild foods focus.
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Elizabeth Hargrave and her husband, Matt Cohen, who leads nature walks in the Washington D.C. area with a wild foods focus.
Emily Kwong/NPR
Undergrove draws heavily from current research, including the work of evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers, who founded SPUN, the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks.
In real life, trees obtain most of their carbon through photosynthesis; so, that’s how gameplay works in Undergrove. Trees exchange this carbon for nutrients (like nitrogen) from the mycorrhizal network.
“People always say that trees are the lungs of the earth. But the fungus is actually the nervous system, which connects everything,” says physicist Loreto Oyarte Gálvez, a collaborator of Kiers.
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This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer. Special thanks to Max Barnhart, Duncan Coltharp, Natasha Branch and Remy Barnwell.
