Orchard

Anneliese Farkaschovsky. Art by Walter Matheis. HABA, 1986.

2-8 Players | 10 Minutes | Age 3-6

Anneliese Farkaschovsky’s Orchard is a collaborative game aimed at players aged between 3 and 6. As its name suggests, it is a game about fruit picking. The rule book tells us: ‘The four fruit-trees are full of fruit. The apples, pears, cherries and plums are ripe and have to be picked quickly, because the crafty raven is eager to pinch some tidbits.’ The game is nicely produced, with no plastic pieces, and comes from a company with a clearly stated environmental policy. This states that the company have been producing wooden toys with a PEFC seal since 2010, using beech and birch wood from sustainable forests. They also claim to support the preservation of an ecological balance of forests and aim to make a significant and lasting contribution to improving forest use and maintenance.

In keeping with the target audience, gameplay is very straightforward. Each turn players roll a die on which there are four coloured circles (each of which corresponds to one of the four fruits on the board), a raven, and a basket. When players roll a circle they take a fruit of the same colour from the board and place it into their baskets. When the basket is rolled players select any two fruit. This is the only decision players (who are playing properly) make during the game. Players will likely soon discover that this one choice comes with an optimal response: select the fruit of which the largest number remain in play. Should players roll the raven, the game’s antagonist, they place one of nine raven tiles on the board. If all nine tiles are placed, completing the picture of the raven, the game ends. While requiring little strategic thinking, Orchard provides young children with an opportunity to learn turn-taking, counting and colour recognition, to develop their fine motor skills, and to practice, in a non-competitive space, winning and losing.

Orchard models the notion that the longer fruit is left on trees the more likely it is to be eaten by birds. Harvesting fruit, therefore, becomes a race against time. Unsurprisingly for the target age group, no attention is given to the specific ecologies of orchards. For example, the likelihood of four different species of tree all bearing fruit simultaneously is not part of the game, nor is there any reference to threats to orchards, or the importance of suitable cultivars to ensure pollination. Significantly, the system embedded in the game models a conflict between humans (who seek to maximise their harvest) and the non-human world which threatens this aim. This threat to fruit production (or to human desire) is figured as a carrion bird (one associated with death and destruction) and the victory of the non-human over the human is tied to chance. It is notable that while the human society modelled by the game is one of cooperation and shared labour, this cooperation does not extend to the non-human in that the player-harvesters are unable to share any fruit while the raven, it appears, would be satisfied with just a little.

For details on how young people have played and hacked Orchard during the Games Imagining the Future Project see Play and the Environment: Games Imagining the Future. Many of these hacks emphasized the economic dimension of fruit harvesting, instituting costs for the buying and selling of fruit, with players discussing the unfairness of capitalist food production. Players also suggested that the raven, Theo, was being unfairly maligned and that the players’ aim to harvest all the fruit would likely lead to him having nothing.