Grow Wildly and Greenly in Evergreen, Treeblox, and Tinderblox Sunset

I've seen plenty of "green" games announced by publishers recently, with green taking on multiple meanings even within the same game. Such is the case with Evergreen, a 1-4 player game from designer Hjalmar Hach and publisher Horrible Guild due out in Q4 2022.

Evergreen seems to carry over elements from Hach's 2017 title Photosynthesis, but with each player now having their own game board to develop as they wish. Here's a short description:

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In Evergreen, your goal is to build a lush ecosystem by planting seeds, growing trees, and placing other natural elements on your planet, trying to make it the greenest and most fertile of all.

You choose biome cards from a common pool to determine which area of your planet you'll develop in a round. The cards not chosen make those regions more fertile, and thus more valuable. To create a huge forest, you want to grow trees, plant bushes, and place lakes, while using the power of nature to gain extra actions. Ideally you can concentrate your trees in the most fertile areas, but without them overshadowing one another as you also want them to collect as much light as possible.

Horrible Guild's Alessandro Pra' confirmed the connection between Evergreen and Photosynthesis to me, noting that in both games the sun rotates around the board with players trying to ensure that their trees gather light, but otherwise they differ greatly: "Photosynthesis is a cutthroat game where you compete for space on a shared board, whereas Evergreen has competition for the card-selection phase, but becomes a more relaxed experience when you develop your (personal) board. In some ways it is similar to Railroad Ink in that regard."

In its promotional material, Horrible Guild notes that "all the components of the game are developed to be as sustainable as possible", and "Evergreen supports Trees for the Future, a humanitarian and nonprofit organization training communities and farming families across nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa on sustainable land use, so that they can grow vibrant economies, thriving food systems, and a healthier planet". Pra' notes that Horrible Guild made an initial donation before settling on the size of Evergreen's first printing — a donation that equals "over 4,000 trees planted" — and on top of that "we plan to periodically make further donations to support their sustainability endeavors".

• UK publisher Alley Cat Games has launched a "pre-order party" for two titles due out in Q4 2022: Tinderblox Sunset and Catstronauts.

The former title is a new version of Rob Sparks' 2020 fire-building and -stacking game Tinderblox that contains a marshmallow mini-expansion — roast marshmallows by stacking them on the wood without letting them touch fire! — and (more importantly for this post) is Alley Cat's first FSC-compliant release, with FSC being the Forest Stewardship Council. This release will contain wooden pieces from officially approved sources, have FSC-approved stickers on the lid of the tin case, and no single-use plastic, i.e., no shrinkwrap. (The game does include plastic tweezers that are essential for gameplay and used repeatedly.)

The Tinderblox line

Catstronauts comes from designers Caezar Al-Jassar and Simon Milburn, who released the real-time, cat-stacking game Kittin in 2020, and Catstronauts features similar gameplay, with you racing to place your feline explorers on planets in the correct order.

What is a "pre-order party", you might ask? Alley Cat Games is cutting out the middleman of a crowdfunding site and instead taking orders directly, with that cut going to ecological purposes: "For every pre-order party purchase over £10 (excluding shipping), we will plant three trees, with our partners: Ecologi. Back at our highest level for this campaign and we will plant 6!" As orders are placed, a "virtual forest" will grow on ACG's Ecologi page.

• And we'll close with another game about building greenery, albeit with this one having plastic pieces: Treeblox from designer Philip Olenyk of publisher Emergent Plant Life.

Here's an overview of gameplay:

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Treeblox is an abstract strategy board game in which two trees compete for sunlight in three-dimensional space.

The game starts with an empty board. Players then take turns placing cubes that represent leaves and branches. Unshaded leaves — that is, leaves that are visible when the board is viewed from above — count as active and supply their tree with energy to grow further. Your goal is to shade your opponent's leaves while keeping your own leaves open to the sun.

Each player starts with one leaf in a space on the 4x4 game board. On a turn, if you have 1-2 unshaded leaves, you place one piece on the board, whether a branch or a leaf; if you have three or more unshaded leaves, then you place up to two pieces. You can place nothing in a leaf, so a leaf serves as an endpoint for growth. If you place a branch, however, then you can add a branch or a leaf to any available side of that branch. You can have multiple branches growing on the game board, and the branches and leaves can extend outside of the 4x4 game board. If you build high enough, you can shade an opponent's leaves.

When a player has placed their final piece, whether because they've placed everything or they have no legal placements available, the other player goes through a "final growth" phase in which they place everything they can. At that point, whoever has the most unshaded leaves wins. If you ever have zero unshaded leaves during play, you lose immediately.