Every player begins with a Starting Hedgerow.

From there, your ecosystem grows one card at a time until you’ve built a complete 5 by 4 landscape. Each turn you pick up two cards from the available decks or discard piles, play one card and discard one.

What you choose will shape what you can do later.

Trees may provide shelter. Flowers can provide pollen and nectar. Plants can support insects. Small mammals can become part of the food chain.

Gradually, the empty spaces in front of you begin to turn into something that feels alive.

More than simply collecting animals

You can’t just play any animal wherever you fancy.

Each card has its own requirements. A Wren, for example, needs both insects and wood somewhere in your ecosystem before it can be introduced. Other creatures can be considerably fussier. Some need water directly beside them. Some require vegetation diagonally across the ecosystem.

Others depend on resources positioned like pieces on a chessboard. So the challenge isn’t merely finding a good card. It’s creating the right place for it to live.

Predators change things too

Some animals need prey.

When one of these creatures is introduced, the prey card is flipped face-down in its existing position. That card stops scoring points, but becomes an abundant landscape that provides a variety of resources for the rest of the game.

It creates an interesting trade-off. You may lose points from one card, but gain a stronger animal and a very useful space in your ecosystem.

Sometimes nature is inconvenient like that!

Inspired by British flora and fauna

The cards feature familiar and less familiar species from around the UK.

Birds, mammals, insects, flowers, trees, waterways and landscapes all form part of the game. Some will be immediately recognisable. Others might make you realise that you’ve walked past the same plant or creature dozens of times without knowing what it was called. The game doesn’t try to turn that into a lesson. It’s simply part of the world you’re building.

Create the most harmonious ecosystem

At the end of the game, every player has a completed 20-card ecosystem.

You’ll score the cards you’ve played, add any individual card bonuses and then compare ecosystems for end-game bonuses such as the longest waterway, deepest forest, most flowers and best pollinator habitat.

The player with the highest total wins. Not necessarily the player with the most animals. Not necessarily the player with the rarest cards.

The best ecosystem is the one where everything has come together.