Undergrove

A new game by Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootton

In this game, you will play a mature Douglas-fir tree in the Pacific Northwest of North America. Your goal is to establish seedlings and help them successfully grow into trees. At the end of the game, the player who has grown the most successful set of seedlings with the most valuable symbiotic relationships will win.

For over 300 million years, trees have traded with fungi in an underground symbiotic relationship known as mycorrhizas. Trees offer some of the carbon they photosynthesize in exchange for nutrients that the fungi extract from the soil. Scientists continue to make new discoveries about this hidden world, including hints that some of the carbon may go through the fungal network and into trees’ seedlings.