She is among the few women in game design - which was something she planned to research, until last December, when she noticed a newly published study exploring exactly that: “Assessing Gender and Racial Representation in the Board Game Industry.”ĭuring the hundreds of Wingspan play tests, some gamers scratched their heads and said, “Birds? Really!?” They expressed concern that our feathered friends might not resonate with a community usually drawn to zombies, dragons, spaceships, farming, civilizations and (of course) trains.īut during the pre-order period in January, more than 5,000 games sold in a week the game is now on its third print run, with a total of 30,000 games in English, and 14,000 in various foreign-language editions. Hargrave also has a card game, Tussie Mussie, about the Victorian language of flowers, launching in May, and a game about monarch butterflies, with the working title Mariposas, due for release next year.
(Endangered birds confer special powers.) At its most extreme, it ran five hundred and ninety six rows by nearly one hundred columns - sorting, for instance, by order, class, genus, habitat, wingspan, nest type, eggs, food and red-list status. She also made use of the lab’s All About Birds website, as well as Audubon’s online guide. Hargrave pulled data on North American birds from eBird, a citizen-science project managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. In “Wingspan,” published Friday by Stonemaier Games, players assign birds with various powers - represented by 170 illustrated cards, hand-drawn by two artists, Natalia Rojas and Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo - to wetland, grassland and forest habitats.Īiming to design a game with scientific integrity, Ms. “But then, working in the field, I realized how much I also enjoy the crunchy analytics.”Īnd in her spare time, she’s been crossbreeding her analytics skills and her birding hobby to hatch something new: a board game, her first ever, about … birds. “I came for the social policy, wanting to help people,” she said. “There are diving ducks and dabbling ducks,” she said. Hargrave had barely set up her scope when she spotted another species of her beloved crazy-billed birds: “Oh, fun!” She’d caught two northern shovelers, their beaks submerged, trawling for invertebrates. Setting out on a trail around the lake, bird guide close at hand, Ms. Fringed with woods, the lake is artificial, excavated during the construction of Washington’s Green Line in the 1970s in those days, the area was known as Lake Metro.
Hargrave, a health-policy consultant in Silver Spring, Md., is an avid birder, and her favorite local winter birding spot is the Lake Artemesia Natural Area. “Crazy bills get me,” she said on a recent sunny Saturday. It is Elizabeth Hargrave’s favorite bird. The roseate spoonbill is roughly the size of a great blue heron, with the pink plumage of a flamingo and a giant spoon-shaped bill - “gorgeous at a distance and bizarre up close,” according to the Audubon Guide to North American birds.