Meadow:The Card Game
An ecology card game for ages 9+. Learn about the interrelationships between native plants and animals while building your own meadow. Watch out for rabbits, invasives and other players taking your plants! Available in the store and online (online coming soon)
The foundation of the meadow are plants. Six families of plants and 16 different species are represented. Each of these plants are common meadow plants in Northeastern United States. Each plant hosts a large variety of insects and other creatures. Here are some of the plant cards.
To build their meadow, players draw and discard cards. Insect cards have the same color background as the Insects with more than one color in the bottom box can live on several different plants. The more insects and creatures that live on your plants, the more points you get!
Luckily, there are other cards that will help you protect your plants and add more to your meadow.
But not all plants and creatures enhance your meadow. Watch out for invasive plants and browsing mammals!
The Game in Action
Here the player has drawn a Multiflora rose card. This plant is invasive which means it moves into an area and pushes out plants that support more insects and animals.
The invasive species pushes out one plant from your meadow. In other words, you have to discard one plant. Unfortunately, when the plant goes, the insects that depend upon the plant also disappear. However, the player chooses the plant to discarded. A good strategy would be to choose the one that currently has the least point value. If you discard the wood violet, you lose the ants as well. However, if you discarded the milkweed, you lose 3 other creatures and 4 points. While the humming bird could move to the golden rod, the other two insects cannot. Notice that all three card have the colors of the plant or plants they depend upon.
Therefore, this player chose to put the violets and the ants on the discard pile with the multiflora rose card. Don't worry, the violets will be back but also the multiflora rose and other invasive plants.
At the top of this play space, is the deck from which players draw from when it is their turn (the pile that is face down) and to the left is the discard pile (face-up)
Below the discard pile is an example of one player's meadow in progress. They have three plants and five different creatures that depend upon these plants. Notice that they plants and creatures that depend upon them are color coded. Creatures that can depend upon more than one plant, like the hummingbird, may have several colors.
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The Assassin bug card has a red border because this insect is a predator. Notice the text box is pink, because it is a predator that hunts on milkweed
The winner of the game is the player with the most points. So farm, this player has 6 points.