Overgrown: the tabletop game letting nature take over the city
Designer Bryan Bell on his post-apocalyptic puzzler where thriving ecosystems take over abandoned urban areas
Well done everyone. We've really done it this time.
Have we elected a bunch of idiots fuelled by their own avarice, who would rather push the nuclear button than give away a cent of their ill-gotten gains?
Have we allowed corporations to lay waste to natural resources, in doing so burning away our atmosphere so that we’re collectively sending our planet the way of Venus?
Have we tested the wrong drugs on the wrong monkeys, resulting in an inter-primate revenge tragedy requiring several movies starring the avatar of Andy Serkis to explain?
Whichever it is, or a combination of these and more, what kind of life thrives after a grand-scale species-wide cock-up?
That’s what Bryan Bell is speculating with his game, Overgrown, which sees players take on the role of an entire ecosystem trying to claim a post-apocalyptic cityscape as its own.
We spoke to Bryan about his tabletop fable of flora and fauna.
How would you describe Overgrown?
BB: Overgrown is a competitive spatial puzzle game about helping nature reclaim an abandoned city by managing element tiles placed into a 4x4 grid of city blocks.
Groups of unique elements can be consolidated to grow ecosystems, covering a city block with new life and groups of alike elements can attract wildlife to your city.
However, where players place their tiles determines what tiles their opponents can take for their own cities.
The primary puzzle is resolving that tension between trying to avoid filling up your city by growing as many ecosystems as possible and making risky plays that hopefully put your opponents in even trickier positions.
What's your background and how did you get into game design?
BB: I’ve been a computer engineer for the past decade working on wireless systems automation.
I’ve loved board games all my life, but like a lot of folks who spend all day on a computer, tabletop gaming has become one of my favourite pastimes.
The first time I really started thinking about game design was back in the early 2010s when I read the Secret History of Dominion that Donald X released. That coincided with my foray into making something myself, as some friends and I attempted to make our own Dominion expansion after completely exhausting the expansions that had been released at the time.
It was my first run-in with the fact that so much of what makes a mechanic fun is in the details and execution. The idea itself is only half the battle.
This overgrown city: what's happened in the lore to get it that way?
BB: I purposefully tried to leave it somewhat mysterious, in line with the way that nature recovers and regrows without any knowledge of what caused it to be cut back in the first place.
That being said, there are definitely some threads to lead you to what might have happened. One of the first things players will do when setting up the game is place a smoldering crater over one of the city blocks, but there are also other signs in the artwork of the city that hint at some kind of catastrophe.
Of course, there is also plenty of pollution, which players will have to work around or try to clean up.
What's been your main influences, both culturally and in game design, in creating this?
BB: From a game-design perspective, making a tabletop game that captures the joy of tile-matching phone games like 2048 or Triple Town has been a bit of a white whale for me.
The length and fiddliness of a literal adaptation makes it a non-starter, so ultimately Overgrown focuses on adding a little complexity to each individual placement to make that decision more meaningful, and shortens the game by having the maximum ‘tier’ of the tiles be tier 3.
The big hook of the game, where players determine other players’ options via their own placements, came from adapting a mechanic in Horseless Carriage, where players fence in customers using little plastic marketing windows.
Culturally, the verdant but apocalyptic environments of Annihilation, The Last of Us, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Life After People spark my imagination like few others. I was playing through The Last of Us: Part II while working on the beginnings of Overgrown, and at the time I was living in downtown Seattle (The Last of Us: Part II’s setting). I was unable to get my mind off of the imagery of new plant life completely enveloping the skyscrapers surrounding me.
Have you had any particularly insightful comments that have improved the game during playtesting?
BB: Absolutely! I have to give a special thanks to PlaytestNW, which runs designer meet-ups and playtest events in the Puget Sound area.
Overgrown wouldn’t be the game that it is without them. During one playtesting event, a player suggested a solution that happened to solve two problems that I had been wrestling with simultaneously: pollution was somewhat unbalanced in the game, as it felt somewhat random as to who gets punished by it, and the highest value tile in the game (a Flourishing Ecosystem) felt undervalued.
Both problems were tricky because the levers I had to change them weren’t very granular due to the size and length of the game, but the player suggested that pollution could be cleaned up by Flourishing Ecosystems under specific circumstances, which would mimic the real-world way that pollution is broken down and processed by some ecosystems.
It felt like a pretty minor change as Flourishing Ecosystems are rare and only achieved late in the game, but it completely revolutionised how people engaged with Overgrown.
Now some players proactively take pollution onto their board for the chance to clean it up and pollution presents an opportunity to players who didn’t want it but got stuck with it.
What environmental sustainability measure are you taking in producing the game?
BB: From the start, I knew a game about ecological growth would have to be produced sustainably. As such, the game and box are entirely composed of paper and wood products.
I am also talking to manufacturers about what options they have for using previously recycled materials in construction.
Do you have any favourite board games you and family members enjoy playing together?
BB: Dominion and Splendor have been mainstays in our house for a long time, although Clank! and its many variants have started to eclipse them in play count at this point.
Recently, we’ve become obsessed with Oink Games; we love that they can typically be learned and played in under an hour. Moving Wild is the latest of theirs that we've played, and we love its more open-ended take on a drafting game like Sushi Go!.
When we have time for a longer play session, we’ve been going through The 7th Citadel, a huge storytelling and exploration game that I feel we’ve barely scratched the surface of. I am completely bewildered by the designers of storytelling and RPG-based tabletop games. Any time I think about designing one, I get overwhelmed by the sheer number of systems and the complexity of writing an open-ended story that players can meaningfully interact with.
When does the Kickstarter go live, how can people follow its production progress and when can backers expect to have the game?
BB: I plan on providing monthly updates on the manufacturing and distribution process via Kickstarter after it finishes.
You can also follow me via @goodtimehat on Instagram and Bluesky for more granular updates on the process, and for info regarding conventions where I’ll be demoing Overgrown.
Overgrown is ready to manufacture as is, but one stretch goal we’re going to have for the Kickstarter is additional art to add variety to the ecosystems players can grow and allow for some self-expression in how their city ends up looking. That being said, this would simply be replacing art that already exists and wouldn’t affect manufacturing aside from requiring some additional time for the art to be drawn.
I’ve managed enough projects to know that “underpromise, overdeliver” is the best path to success, so we’re shooting for delivery by the holiday season of 2025.
For more information, visit goodtimehat.com
