For over 300 million years, trees have traded nutrients with fungi in a vast underground network. Scientists continue to make new discoveries about this hidden world.
In Undergrove, you are a towering evergreen with an ancient symbiotic connection to the fungi in your forest. As new mushrooms appear, your options expand for converting nutrients and helping your seedlings. Using cube conversion, tile placement, area control, and a tiny bit of engine building, you’ll need to claim the most advantageous locations and optimize your actions to leave the best legacy in the forest. The player with the greatest number of successful seedlings, wins!
● Build a shared forest containing mushrooms with diverse abilities.
● Trade with the mushrooms to get resources based on the partnerships you’ve made.
● Place your seedings in the most advantageous positions to score the most points.
Inspired by real mycorrhizal trading networks. Shape the destiny of your forest with every decision!
-description from publisher
- strong natural science inspiration
- clever, approachable take on ecological systems
- some speculative science choices may be debated by experts
- mechanics can be subtle; may require careful playtesting to balance
- mushrooms, mycology, forest ecology
- forest micro-ecosystem; fungal and plant interactions
- science-flavored fiction with plausible biology
- Mariposas
- Wingspan
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- hand-management and card-driven actions — player cards simulate ecological processes with strategic depth
- resource/biology-themed mechanics — mechanics rooted in ecological balance and nutrient transfer ideas
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- I choose the idea first and then have to figure out that balance of how to make it work as a game and not and like feel true but not be overly stuck.
- trial and error of like okay how much detail can you work in so it feels true
- it's not that we have some magical knowledge that no one else can have
- one thing that I try to do that and this is not a route that everyone is going to have available to them… if it's a woman they'll be like yeah I've kind of thought about it
- advance I think that's probably your best way of either getting the publisher to feel like they have enough skin in the game
- the default is the status quo