Drylands Board Game

Drylands Board Game by Montrose Biology

Set in Africa’s Sahel region, "Drylands" uses Africa’s Great Green Wall as its backdrop.

The Great Green Wall is a multinational project aimed at planting a continuous belt of trees across Africa to stop the spread of desertification.

Drylands are fragile ecosystems where deserts border savanna and/or forest biomes. These places can easily be degraded into desert-like conditions or nurtured to be greener and more productive. It depends on how the land is managed.

In this two player game the desert player competes with the forest player to decide the outcome of a small section of drylands.

The gameplay and strategy is abstract, reminiscent of Othello, Go, or Reversi, where the objective is to flip opponent tiles.

Each turn players can “grow” by placing a new tile next to their established tiles, or they can “leap” using an existing tile to move to a location farther away.

Whenever you place one of your tiles next to opponent tiles, either through growing or leaping, those opponent tiles flip and become yours.

This is made slightly more complicated by one-way barrier tiles (rivers and mountains) that block the path of players. Forest tiles can leap over rivers, but not mountains. Desert tiles can leap over mountains, but not rivers.

A game that’s easy to learn but hard to master, it is suitable for a wide range of ages, from 5 to 105.

In the box is a large quad fold game board (14.5"x14.5") and five rigid tile sheets (20 tiles per sheet = 100 tiles total) You actually only need 4 tile sheets to play the game, but we included an extra sheet of tiles because we know small pieces are easy to lose and we wanted players to have plenty of extra tiles just in case!