Upland & Prairie is a tame board game with a wild theme

Designed by Peer Sylvester, Upland & Prairie is a lightweight and very attractive little board game of returning wildlife to the Scottish uplands or the Montana prairie. It offers a quick to play tactical puzzle that’s fun, relaxing, but far from revolutionary.

I asked for a review sample of Upland & Prairie from publisher Osprey – and as part of Wargamer’s constant search for worthy titles for our guide to the best board games, of course. In a past career in the zoo industry my partner kept lynx, and she’s worked on native species reintroduction projects; I was interested to learn if the game’s mechanics engage with any of the complexities of apex species reintroductions.

Reader, it does not. Upland & Prairie isn’t a deep investigation of human-animal conflict or environmental restoration. The environmental theme carries through the art and components, illustrated by scientific illustrator Hannah Cohen, and they creep into the mechanics here and there – there are also some good suggestions for further reading at the back of the rulebook. But this game is too slight to have a huge amount to say on the topic.

Play begins by creating a hexmap of either the Scottish uplands or Montanan prairie using reversible tiles. Each turn you’ll draw three animal tokens from a shared bag. These come in three different types, with double-sided art to reflect the two different landscapes the game takes place in: you’ve got a lynx or mountain lion, a tawny owl or burrowing owl, and a pine marten or black-footed ferret.

You return one animal, place one behind your screen for end-game scoring, and one goes out anywhere on the map. Initially, hexes can only contain one animal, but a progression system – slightly different for each biome – allows more animals to co-exist as the game goes on. In practical terms this allows animals to create routes through one another’s territory (double-down in one area to block others out), but it also nicely reflects how that biodiversity enables biodensity.

You’re working towards two possible end-game conditions. If the players completely rewild the environment and emptying the token bag, then whoever has the most complete sets of all three animals wins.

But the map tiles also contain special goal locations which match up with those on other tiles – paired goals which you’ll place far apart, and slightly closer triple goals – and if one animal species makes an unbroken path that connects the locations in either set, then whichever player has the most of that animal behind their screen wins.

The fact you don’t “own” any of the animals that are on the board may be intended to show the hands-off approach of animal reintroductions. But the fact you have an investment in them which you can change during the game creates a parallel with an unexpected game genre: Upland & Prairie is a diminutive, lightweight relative of the epic railway building 18XX genre, in the same way that the rodent-like rock hyrax is the closest evolutionary relative of the elephant.

This gameplay is light. Victory comes from identifying which animal is closer to completing a winning route, and making an educated guess about which player has a bigger investment in it. If you think you’re ahead of your opponent on the leading animal, you can push towards a victory with it; if you’re unsure, you need to block it from winning.

It’s purely tactical, not strategic. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not what you generally associate with hexes, counters, and painting the map red. I’ve found all my games of Upland & Prairie to be interesting and fun, but neither antagonistic nor particularly challenging. It’s a chill-out game, the board game equivalent of flicking on the TV or booting up a comfort videogame. There’s a place for those.

Source: Wargamer