Parks

Henry Aubudon. Art by Fifty-Nine Parks Print Series. Keymaster Games, 2021.

1-5 players | 30-60 minutes | Age 10+

Parks is a resource management and travel board game where players take on the role of hikers trekking trails in North American national parks throughout four seasons of the year. The game’s objective is to score as many victory points as possible, which are earned by visiting national parks, taking photographs along the way, and completing secret personal bonus objectives. Like Rustling Leaves and Bosk, which are also discussed here, the gameplay of Parks changes with each season of the year. Throughout the game, four seasons comprise each round, and each season’s weather will define the trail that the players trek. The resource management elements of Parks centre on the players’ hiking equipment, which includes materials for a campfire and a water canteen. Equipment can also be bought that provides the player unique bonuses and aid them through their trails. For example, a water bottle lets the player refill their canteen at the trailhead, while a compass reduces the cost of resources to visit a park.

Parks’ corresponding narrative drive and mechanics of movements through trails highlight its celebratory imagining of national parks, pushing the player to ‘get out there’ and witness as much as possible. Its story and playstyle are reminiscent of Tokaido (2012), a board game where each player travels the ‘East Sea Road’ in Japan and, on the way, tastes food, collects items, discovers vistas, and visits temples. Unlike some other nature-inspired board games, resource management and competition stem from human-centred equipment and behaviours rather than the national parks being implicated in such endeavours. With competition and resource management being human-centred, hacking a littering mechanism into the game would be an astute way of exploring human-environment relationships. In such a hack, victory points could be earned for each piece of litter picked up while visiting each national park. Every year, visitors to US national parks generate nearly 100 million pounds of rubbish (Pierno 2017). In recent decades, visitation to national parks has increased rapidly and with it, so has the magnitude of littering in these protected areas (Brown, Ham & Hughes 2010). Although a littering mechanic might appear at odds with Parks’ pristine aesthetic, it would pertinently represent how empty packets of crisps or plastic water bottles pollute national parks.

But as much as the choice Parks makes to not implicate the natural environment in the resource collection mechanic of the game helps to highlight the dangers of extractive logics, it also supports the ideology summed up by the phrase “leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but pictures”. While this kind of respect for the environment can be useful from a conservation standpoint, the US national parks have come into conflict with the indigenous peoples which still live on or near the environments that the parks are attempting to protect, as it assumes that all interaction with natural spaces by humans is inherently destructive. One historical example of this conflict is when the Havasupai people were prevented from gathering Pinion nuts and hunting deer in the land near the Grand Canyon National Park’s rim, out of fear that they would disrupt the environment that they had been living in for millennia (Hirst 2007).