Atiwa

The Atiwa chain is an area in southeastern Ghana in Africa, consisting of hills with steep slopes and fairly flat peaks. Much of the chain includes an evergreen forest reserve, home to many endangered species. Logging, bushmeat hunting and gold and bauxite mining are putting great pressure on the reserve. Meanwhile, the mayor of the neighboring town of Kibi is causing excitement by sheltering a large group of bats in his yard. He has realized the value of these animals in deforested areas of our planet: bat dogs sleep during the day and hunt for food at sunset, searching for fruit trees many miles away. On their way home, they excrete the seeds of the eaten fruit, spreading them over a large area: one colony of 150,000 bats can forest an area of up to 2,000 hectares per year. 

In the game Atiwa you have 3 workers, with whom you can perform 3 actions each round. For example, you can expand your city with terrain and location cards. Each of them offers different fields on which you can store families, animals, trees, fruit and, most importantly, bats. An ingenious mechanism with action field tiles ensures that the action fields vary somewhat from one round to the next. Some actions are bad for the environment. This is represented by pollution tokens that you get as a result of the action. You must place these on fields of your terrain and location cards, making them unusable until the end of the game. You may also perform a bat dog action after performing your regular action if you can, but that is optional. After all players have deployed their workers, the maintenance phase follows. Animals reproduce, families need to be fed, and fruit grows on trees. One of the most thematic details of the game lies in training families. Families with knowledge get automatic income, untrained families have to work for their gold with all its detrimental effects on the environment. 

Atiwa is a wonderful board game by well-known game author Uwe Rosenberg. He has succeeded in turning a topical and important topic very thematically into a spirited strategic game. The game includes an appendix, in which the author further explains the theme and shows how he incorporated the various details into the game.