Tim Eisner. Art by Vincent Dutrait. Weird City Games, 2021.
1-4 players | 30 minutes | Age 8+
Canopy is a card collecting game in which players take turns selecting new cards in order to grow a rainforest. The forest consists of trees, formed by trunk and canopy cards, along with animal, plants, and environment cards that interact with one another and score or deduct points from the forest total overall. Gameplay occurs over three years, with players picking consecutively from three growth piles. Each time you look at a pile, you may select it and add those cards to your rainforest tableau, or return the pile face down, adding one additional card to it for the next player to pick up.
The publisher describes Canopy as ‘a game in which two players compete to grow the most bountiful rainforest.’ The vibrant and photo-realistic artwork of ‘tall trees’ and ‘lush jungle plants’ evoke the rainforest as a dense, exotic and fully ‘natural’ space, devoid of human life or interference. Positive notions of ecology are evoked in the aesthetics and the rules, which state that the ‘jungle ecosystem is full of symbiosis and mutualism, and players must grow tall trees and lush jungle plants to attract the most diverse wildlife. By carefully selecting what grows in your forest, you can create the ideal balance of flora and fauna and develop a thriving rainforest.’ The language of natural abundance, evoked in the words ‘lush’ and ‘balance’, and the card-scoring mechanics suggest that a key feature of ecosystems is their networked nature, something that contemporary nature writers such as Wohlleben (2018) and Sheldrake (2020) are keen to emphasize as key to tackling climate change. Canopy thus makes into a ludic feature the relational nature of ecosystems and does not privilege the tall trees of the rainforest as the dominant means of point scoring, as is the case in some other nature games featuring trees discussed elsewhere in the ludography (see, e.g. Sequoia and Photosynthesis)(see also: Germaine 2022). However, in its emphasis on mutualism and symbiosis, Canopy perpetuates what John Kricher calls the myth of the ‘balance’ of nature (2009). As Kricher notes, in popular ecology the ‘biodiversity of the forest is in a kind of stable, long-lasting equilibrium’, a notion that has been largely discredited in favour of the idea that forests, along with other kinds of ecosystems are dynamic and changing (2009: 17). The replayability of the game and the random element involved in what cards might feature in each growth pile does, to an extent, model this kind of unpredictable dynamism.
In our play sessions we discussed the role of the human in the game and how the player is positioned in relation to the natural subjects depicted on the cards. We thought that an interesting feature was the relatively passive nature of the player, who has limited choices in terms of actions and must pick up all cards from one of the growth piles and place them into their rainforest whether they like the selection or not. This mechanic suggests that the player is not a forest manager, since much of the player choice and agency in the game is foreclosed. The unpredictable proliferation of life is simulated quite nicely through these mechanics: the human player gets a limited choice as to how many ferns, disease cards, tree, boas, and other creatures or plants they end up having to place into the forest.
What is significant in the game is the lack of any representation of the human, nor of interspecies relationships beyond those between plants and smaller animals. Canopy thus elides the ways in which the rainforest has been an economic, political and social space for hundreds of years, not only for indigenous peoples, but, since the encroachment of colonialism and capitalism, also a space for industrial-scale logging, agriculture and resource extraction. The rainforest has never been a simply ‘natural’ site devoid of humans. This myth of untouched nature is unsettling. In Canopy, for example, drought, disease and forest fires are represented as purely emergent natural disasters, as opposed to themselves being part of shifting conditions of the ecosystem as it interacts with wider climate, social, and economic systems. We discussed hacks that would add cards to the game to reimagine the rainforest as an ‘anthropogenic biome’ — a term used by ecologists to shift understanding toward the fact that human and ecological systems are integrated not separate (Ellis and Ramankutty 2008) — and that explored the ecosystemic interactions of humans and more-than-humans, perhaps introducing economic and social activity as imbricated with the ‘natural’.
Content created by Seth Etchells, Chloé Germaine, Charlotte Gislam, Lucy Roberts, Paul Wake, Jack Warren. Adapted from the Ecogame Ludography.
References
- Ellis, E. C and N. Ramankutty. 2008. ‘Putting People on the Map: Anthropogenic Biomes of the World’. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6 (8): 439-447. https://doi.org/10.1890/070062
- Germaine, C. 2022. Nature Games in a Time of Climate Crisis. In Material Game Studies, eds. Paul Wake and Chloé Germaine, London: Bloomsbury.
- Kricher, J. 2009. The Balance of Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth, Princeton University Press.
Sheldrake, M. 2020. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, London: Random House.
Wohlleben, P. 2018. The Secret Network of Nature. Translated by Jane Billinghurst. London: The Bodley Head.