CHENNAI: Naturalists in the city and this includes the budding, aspiring, self-discovering, in-spirit-but-not-yet-inname kinds as well are sure to have sampled the joy of a well-planned nature walk or birding or trekking experience.
If you've been in the company of Yuvan Aves and team, you might have even been treated to the goodness of shore walks and Beach Bingo.
Not wanting to stop the fun there, Yuvan's Palluyir Trust for Nature Education and Research, in association with Madras Naturalists Society, of fers the naturalist in you a chance to graduate to the next level of engagement and entertainment in The Wilderness - an ecologybased card game! A project that has been in the making for six months finally gets its place on the stand.
Within a week of its launch, Yuvan has sold out nearly 300 packs of cards and his social media handles are abuzz with word of patrons finding fun and creative ways of making the most of this uniquely designed educational material.
"The reception has been mad; there have been people buying 5-10 packs a set. I have run out of the first 300 packs I printed, I have to go for a reprint. I've been getting some very good reception, especially from educator-parent circles and of course naturalists circles," shares Yuvan.
One for all
That the game could garner such a uniformly positive response from such a wide base is no mean feat. It does so by offering something for everyone who makes their way to it. The aesthetically designed cards may be a handful, literally, but it's not without reason.
Every little detail - picture/ illustration of the species, Who Am I? trivia, information about its role in the ecosystem (autotroph, pollinator, detritivore, architect, etc) - finds itself in just the right space, ensuring that it never becomes 'too much information'.
There's much thought and effort put into auxiliary aspects like the colour scheme and the doodles on the back of each card. And the gameplay is sure to interest any card-game enthusiast. The Wilderness, primarily focusing on the biodiversity of Chennai, separates its species into four ecosystems - Beach, Coastal Wetland, Marshland and Ocean.
While many species are exclusive to each of these regions, there are some that overlap between two or more ecosystems; be it the lugworm (found in Coastal Wetland, Beach and Ocean) or grey mongoose (Marshland and Beach).
After being dealt an ecosystem, your task is to build it and protect your habitat. Theme-appropriate action cards Trawling, Invasion, Mutualism, Industrial Effluents, Community Conservation, etc will have their own role to play along the way.
After hours of play, the person with the most representative ecosystem wins the game. And if you've picked up a certain level of awe for the natural world around you in the process, well, that would be a bigger win for Yuvan and co.
Learning aplenty
Yuvan got to witness this firsthand among the children and trainers of Pudiyador. "They had massive fun. There was a general interest in this. Even though some of the staff did not know English, they could match the symbols. While playing, there was an arboreal ant nearby and one of the players pointed it out and said, 'Hey! I have that card!'. So, it's local biodiversity as opposed to (say) Pokemon with imaginary creatures. Creatures around us as magical and awe-evoking, they can be if we observe them a little bit more and their role in our lives," he narrates.
Prarthana Balaji attests to that. Having played the game, she reports having walked away with the feeling of connectedness with the world. "You're like wow, the world is so big and there are so many things you don't know, you're learning how important it is," she says.
Aditya was struck by how it talks about the lesser-noticed things about our environment. "As a birdwatcher, I only look at the big species or the charismatic ones. Those are the ones people are attracted to. One of the components of building this ecosystem was looking at smaller species. That way, it has a very good educational value. It makes people consider the importance of scavengers or detritivores," he reasons.
A life of its own
A true testament to the brilliance of the game is that people have been finding far more ways to engage with it. There were a bunch of children playing with multiple sets, opening the game to more permutations and combinations.
Somebody's doing Heads Up and somebody else is doing Match the Habitat. "We thought of three-four ways in which this could be used and also as reference material for kids but people are coming up with new ways of playing it; it's a new learning for us. We are working on documenting that on the website," Yuvan shares.
The experience has been just as rich and enriching behind the scenes for the game makers, it seems. Rohit Srinivasan remembers the hours of testing they put it through to fine-tune the gameplay, offer every ecosystem a decent chance at winning. It was quite a challenge to make it child-friendly and keep it fun while being educational. Curiously enough, he found the most joy in creating the rules around the game.
Charlotte Trishika Jeffries had mentioned how the game evolved from a simple 'Who Am I?' cards to its current form, based on quite a lot of research and wanting to make something of their own. The success of the trial rounds, with people familiar with ecology and otherwise, stands out for Nanditha Ram Satagopan.
That knowledge of the subject didn't affect how much people liked the game is what she loved about the whole process, she shares. Perhaps, you can attest to it too.
The Wilderness is available on palluyirtrust.org for Rs 499.