Protect fruit bats in Ghana!
Atiwa is a wonderful board game by the renowned game designer Uwe Rosenberg.
He has succeeded in transforming a topical and important subject into a fast-paced strategic game with a strong thematic focus. The game includes a supplement in which the designer explains the theme in more detail and shows how he has incorporated the various elements into the game.
Why would you want to play this?
• Challenging and highly thematic board game for the true enthusiast
• From top designer Uwe Rosenberg
• Can also be played solo
Why choose Atiwa from 999 Games?
The Atiwa range is an area in south-eastern Ghana in Africa, consisting of hills with steep slopes and fairly flat summits. A large part of the range comprises an evergreen forest reserve, home to many endangered species. Logging, bushmeat hunting and gold and bauxite mining are putting the reserve under severe pressure.
Meanwhile, the mayor of the neighbouring town of Kibi is causing a stir by providing shelter to a large group of fruit bats in his garden. He has recognised the value of these animals in deforested areas of our planet: fruit bats sleep during the day and go hunting for food at sunset, searching for fruit trees located many kilometres away. On their way home, they regurgitate the seeds from the fruit they have eaten, thereby spreading them over a wide area: a single colony of 150,000 fruit bats can reforest an area of up to 2,000 hectares per year.
How do you play Atiwa?
In the game, you have 3 workers, with whom you can perform 3 actions each round. For example, you can expand your city using terrain and location cards. Each of these offers different fields on which you can store families, animals, trees, fruit and, above all, flying foxes. An ingenious mechanism involving action field tiles ensures that the action fields differ slightly from one another each round.
Some actions are bad for the environment. This is represented by pollution tokens that you receive as a result of the action. You must place these on spaces on your terrain and location cards, rendering them unusable until the end of the game. After carrying out your regular action, you may also perform a flying fox action if you can, but this is optional.
Once all players have deployed their workers, the maintenance phase follows. Animals reproduce, families must be fed, and fruit grows on trees. One of the game’s most thematic details lies in training families. Families with knowledge automatically receive an income, whilst untrained families must work for their gold, with all the adverse consequences for the environment.
