• ·June 24, 2025

My sabbatical is coming to an end and my video game, Nebula Hunter, is not finished yet. Making a game by yourself takes a lot of time! I’ll write an update of my work soon. But I have been distracted for the past couple of months with a side project inspired by a conference that I wanted to attend.

The Contemporary Women Writers Association conference was held June 18-20, 2025 at Falmouth University in Cornwall, UK. Cornwall is hard to get to but it is worth the trip because of the beauty of the landscape. The conference itself was worth the trip as well, one of the best I have ever gone to. There were over 100 attendees and the presentations were consistently excellent. I presented about Elizabeth Hargrave, the designer of Wingspan, one of the most popular board games of the last 5 years. This post is an excerpt of what I said during my presentation.

Since the publication of Wingspan in 2019, Hargrave has published 6 additional games. The games have some common characteristics that I believe make her work instantly recognizable. Her work stands out in the board game industry because of their themes and unique game mechanics. Hargrave has herself been concerned with bringing new voices and new ideas into the industry, creating a list on Board Game Geek to highlight non-male designers.

Back in 2014, Hargrave was a data analyst who loved to play board games. She wondered, however, why there were no games about things that she loved and was passionate about. In interviews, she has said, “there were too many games about castles and space, and not enough games about things I’m interested in. So I decided to make a game about something I cared about.” She began designing Bring In the Birds (which later became Wingspan) because of her love of bird-watching. By 2016, Hargrave felt she had done enough play-testing that she contacted game publishers. Only 3 responded to her and she met with them at GenCon where Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games offered her a publishing contract. Together, they continued to play-test and modify the game (including adding a player mat and changing the name) until 2019 when it was published.

Wingspan was an instant hit. The first three print runs of 10,000 sold out within two months. As of January, 2025, the game has sold more than 2.5 million copies. In addition, there are numerous expansions and spin-off games, like Wyrmspan and Finspan. Many gamers have talked about recognizing birds because of the game. The game has also brought some birders into the board game hobby. Hargrave has proven to the board game industry that giving new designers (with ideas for games focused on new themes) a chance is good business. One of the most interesting things about Wingspan is Hargrave’s use of what I call “casual science” in the game. In fact, this is a defining feature of many of her subsequent games as well. To understand Hargrave’s use of casual science, we need to understand a little bit about how the game works.

Wingspan asks the players to build bird ecosystems, where birds are played into one of three habitats (forest, grassland, or marsh). The individual birds are represented by beautifully artistic cards which contain a lot of scientific information about the birds.

Each card displays a painting of the bird and shows both the common name and the scientific name of the bird, the environment(s) the bird lives in, the food the bird eats, the type of nest the bird builds, the number of eggs the bird typically lays, and the size of the bird’s wingspan. In addition, the bottom of each card lists a fun fact about the bird. In order to play the game, the player might completely ignore the scientific information listed on the card but the activation actions on the card often encourage the player to look more closely at that information which makes them more likely to remember it. For example, the activation action on the Northern Harrier shown above gives the player the opportunity to draw a bird card from the deck and look at the size of its wingspan. If the wingspan is small enough, the player can tuck that card behind the Northern Harrier, which will count for a point at the end of the game. Other parts of the game ask the player to pay attention to the common names of the birds, the nest types, and so on. I call this “casual science” because the player doesn’t have to remember any of this information in order to do well in the game. But the more the player plays, the more likely it is that this information will stick. In numerous interviews, Hargrave has said that she enjoys educating people, telling them things that they don’t already know. So she builds games which casually teach this information to the players.

Hargrave further emphasizes casual science in the way the cards work within the game. A game mechanic is an action that a player can take in a game. For example, in Monopoly, the main (or core) game mechanic that the player does over and over is to roll the dice and move their piece on the board that many spaces. In Wingspan, one of the game mechanics is activating the cards that the player has already laid down in the habitats on their player mat. The activation action of most cards mimics something the bird does in the real world.

For example, the fun fact on the Black-headed Cowbird tells us that cowbirds don’t make nests. Instead, they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. When the card for the Black-headed Cowbird is activated, the player can lay eggs when another player’s bird lays eggs, which mimics the information we learned in the fun fact. Another example is from the Yellow-headed Blackbird. The fun fact tells us that these blackbirds form huge flocks and the activation action allows the player to tuck a card behind the blackbird card, forming a kind of flock and giving the player a point at the end of the game. Finally, the fun fact for the Gray Catbird tells us that catbirds mimic other birds. When the Gray Catbird card is activated, the player can copy an activation action from another bird in the same habitat. As the player plays the game, they will start to remember the activation actions for each of these cards which will also casually teach them scientific information about the real-world behavior of the birds.

Casual science is a common characteristic in Hargrave’s games. In Mariposas, the players learn about monarch butterfly migration. In The Fox Experiment, players learn about the genetics of fox breeding programs. (The game was inspired by a real-life breeding program from the 1950s.) In Undergrove, players learn about the symbiotic relationship between mushrooms and trees and the transfer of various elements (carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium) between the various species.

I talked about a lot more elements of Hargrave’s games in my presentation and will probably write about those in the future. But one of my favorite parts of these games is how their design makes learning scientific concepts fun and painless.