She Invented a Board Game With Scientific Integrity. It’s Taking Off.
How Elizabeth Hargrave turned a passion for ornithology and spreadsheets into a popular game about birds.
By Siobhan Roberts
March 11, 2019
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — The roseate spoonbill is roughly the size of a great blue heron, with the pink plumage of a flamingo and a giant spoon-shaped bill — “gorgeous at a distance and bizarre up close,” according to the Audubon Guide to North American birds. It is Elizabeth Hargrave’s favorite bird.
“Crazy bills get me,” she said on a recent sunny Saturday. Ms. Hargrave, a health-policy consultant in Silver Spring, Md., is an avid birder, and her favorite local winter birding spot is the Lake Artemesia Natural Area. Fringed with woods, the lake is artificial, excavated during the construction of Washington’s Green Line in the 1970s; in those days, the area was known as Lake Metro.
Setting out on a trail around the lake, bird guide close at hand, Ms. Hargrave had barely set up her scope when she spotted another species of her beloved crazy-billed birds: “Oh, fun!” She’d caught two northern shovelers, their beaks submerged, trawling for invertebrates. “There are diving ducks and dabbling ducks,” she said. “The northern shovelers are dabblers.”
And in her spare time, she’s been crossbreeding her analytics skills and her birding hobby to hatch something new: a board game, her first ever, about … birds. In “Wingspan,” published Friday by Stonemaier Games, players assign birds with various powers — represented by 170 illustrated cards, hand-drawn by two artists, Natalia Rojas and Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo — to wetland, grassland and forest habitats.
Aiming to design a game with scientific integrity, Ms. Hargrave pulled data on North American birds from eBird, a citizen-science project managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She also made use of the lab’s All About Birds website, as well as Audubon’s online guide.
Then she built a spreadsheet. At its most extreme, it ran five hundred and ninety six rows by nearly one hundred columns — sorting, for instance, by order, class, genus, habitat, wingspan, nest type, eggs, food and red-list status. (Endangered birds confer special powers.
Within the spreadsheet tool, Ms. Hargrave embedded formulas calibrating the score for each bird as the sum of various assets, such as the value of its eggs. What hooked Jamey Stegmaier, president of Stonemaier Games, was Ms. Hargrave’s wonkish ability to strike a fine balance, using so many cards, between the two driving components of game design: mathematics and psychology, with the latter taking precedence. “The key for me wasn’t the birds, but the satisfying feeling of collecting beautiful things,” he said.
Ms. Hargrave also has a card game, Tussie Mussie, about the Victorian language of flowers, launching in May, and a game about monarch butterflies, with the working title Mariposas, due for release next year. She is among the few women in game design — which was something she planned to research, until last December, when she noticed a newly published study exploring exactly that: “Assessing Gender and Racial Representation in the Board Game Industry.”
During the hundreds of Wingspan play tests, some gamers scratched their heads and said, “Birds? Really!?” They expressed concern that our feathered friends might not resonate with a community usually drawn to zombies, dragons, spaceships, farming, civilizations and (of course) trains.
But during the pre-order period in January, more than 5,000 games sold in a week; the game is now on its third print run, with a total of 30,000 games in English, and 14,000 in various foreign-language editions. On official release day, demand so exceeded supply that the publisher issued a public apology. Between birders and gamers, and the birder-gamer hybrid, Wingspan has found its followers — especially, naturally, on Twitter.
Boards of a feather
Ms. Hargrave’s home habitat, which she shares with her landscape-designer husband, Matt Cohen, is its own nature reserve, with vegetables in the backyard and a row of blueberry bushes out front. Inside, her watercolor paintings, of mushrooms and wildflowers, hang on the walls, complemented here and there with shells, snake skins and animal skulls.
The idea for Wingspan came to her after a game night with friends. They got talking about why there weren’t any board games tied to subjects they found interesting. Ms. Hargrave loves the game Castles of Burgundy, but pretending to be an aristocrat in high medieval France isn’t exactly her thing. She wondered, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had Race for the Galaxy” — another game that often hits her table, about building galactic civilizations — “but with birds?”
Wingspan bills itself as a card-driven, engine-building board game: players start with limited strength and slowly assemble their gameplay mechanism, which becomes more powerful with each turn. A classic example is Monopoly, in which players accrete real-estate empires, although hobby gamers would point to more sophisticated examples, such as Terraforming Mars.
