Sequoia. Chad DeShon. Art by Anca Gavril and Daniel Profiri. BoardGameTables.com, 2020.
2-5 Players | 10 minutes | Age 6+
Sequoia is a dice game in which the objective is to vie for dominance and score points by having the tallest (or second tallest) tree in each of the game’s eleven different forests. Each player is given five dice and twenty tokens representing cross-sections of a sequoia tree’s trunk. Forests are represented by tiles labelled two through to twelve and are placed together on a surface in front of the players, and then each tile will be assigned a first and second place marker that signifies the points players will win should they grow the tallest tree in that forest. Gameplay takes place over ten turns, and with each turn, the player will get to grow two trees in any of the forests. To grow their trees, players will secretly roll their five dice at the start of each turn and make two pairs, leaving one dice aside. Each player will then place a tree token on the numbered forest tile that matches each dice pair’s number. With each token placed on the forest tile, the player’s tree with ‘grow’ and the player with the tallest stack of tokens in each of the forests at the end of the game will win the points associated with that forest. The player with the second tallest stack of tokens will win a smaller number of points.
Sequoia trees are famed for their great stature as they tower above all else in their forests, with some of the tallest trees given authoritative names such as ‘General Sherman’ and ‘The President’. A board game centred upon growing the tallest tree befits the perceptions of these gigantic trees. However, as the player is often subject to the luck of the dice, Sequoia feels more akin to the board games Ludo or Frustration with only its height mechanic and art styles representing sequoia trees. Sequoia also divorces players from some of the intricacies of balance that sequoia tree forests rely upon by centring an over-arching goal of points accumulation through the domination of forests by individual trees. Besides their height, sequoia trees are unique in that they have, arguably, adapted to the annual forest fires of western North America and evolved fire-resistant bark (Kaufmann et al, 2007). These wildfires burn away the competing forest vegetation while bringing hot air high up to their canopies which dries and opens their cones and releases seeds to postfire seedbeds now rich with the nutrients. Sequoia’s mechanics are relatively simple, and hacking the game to include a wildfire mechanic where fires must be kept stable throughout the game to proliferate seeds and cultivate the forest, would add another layer to this game that continues to celebrate the exceptionality of the sequoia tree.
Adapted from the Ecogame Ludography entry written by Seth Etchells, Charlotte Gislam, Lucy Roberts, Chloé Germaine, Paul Wake and Jack Warren.
References
Kaufmann, Merrill R., et al. “Defining Old Growth for Fire-Adapted Forests of the Western United States.” Ecology and Society, vol. 12, no. 2, 2007. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26267894. Accessed 20 Mar. 2026.