Learned a new game yesterday, particularly of interest to gardeners and butterfly lovers and science teachers. This is Mariposa, and you spend the game migrating and breeding monarch butterflies. You need a sufficiency of flowers to breed, and some milkweed; there are monarch waystations along the way.
The game is 2-5 players; I think it would change a lot in gameplay with more than 2, so I can’t speak to that. For 2, it’s a little unbalanced in design — the point-scoring means that it honestly isn’t really to your advantage to migrate very far before returning home, which seems a little counter-intuitive. In fact, I think one interesting modification that might improve the game significantly would be to just add one more turn to each round — Jed, what do you think?
But aside from my nitpicking, I did enjoy playing it, would definitely find it helpful and fun in a middle school science class, and it’s a quick, easy-to-teach game suitable for family game night; I think it takes maybe 30 minutes to play in the 2-player version. Recommended.
