Mycelia is a deck-building board game with a natural theme: mushrooms. Each player has their own game board containing 20 dewdrops. You win the game by getting rid of all your dewdrops before the other players. The dewdrops can be moved around the game board by using your cards, while collecting leaves allows you to buy stronger hero cards for your deck.
A forest theme appears to be used throughout the game. Each game board depicts tiles with different landscapes, such as water, moss, leaves, and soil. Additionally, the artwork on the cards includes different mushroom figures. The game appears to be clearly connected to nature in its appearance, but while playing the game, I realised that a natural theme and artwork do not automatically mean that this game has a deeper message about nature.
The main focus is getting rid of the dewdrops as effectively as possible by building a better deck of cards. The leaves are a currency that allows you to buy stronger cards, and as the game continues, you develop a deck with more powerful abilities and cute mushroom figures. The different types of tiles mainly determine which card abilities can be used. For example, some cards can remove dewdrops from water or moss fields, while others can move dewdrops from different types of fields.
In other words, the landscape affects the players’ choices, but the player is not really asked to think about nature itself. The mushrooms, forest, landscapes, and dewdrops make the game feel like it belongs in a natural world. However, I think they mainly give the mechanics a specific setting, and many of the same mechanics could have worked with a completely different theme as well.
The game could have made the condition of the forest more important to the gameplay. It could have made players think more about where they move the dewdrops or how their actions affect the different parts of the forest. This could also have given the mushrooms a clearer purpose. Why is this game about mushrooms specifically? The game could have shown the players what makes mushrooms important in nature and left them with a message about them, instead of mainly using them as the theme of the game.