Wingspan designer’s next board game is about domesticated foxes
You'll be kitted out.
The creator behind Wingspan, Elizabeth Hargrave, has designed a new board game about a different group of animals.
An upcoming board game, The Fox Experiment sees players attempting to domesticate foxes in a tabletop title inspired by real-life events. The board game is based on the Belyaev-Trut Experiment that took place in Novosibirsk, Siberia, wherein a group of scientists began to try and domesticate wild foxes by having them interact with humans, before selecting those that responded more positively for breeding.
With each new generation of foxes, the scientists then selected the most domesticated pups for future breeding, with the goal of eventually breeding foxes that could be introduced into people homes in the same way dogs, cats and other domesticated animals were.
In The Fox Experiment, players perform a similar experiment by having certain foxes from the available pool be bred with one another in order to make pups. Throughout the game, players choose from pairs of fox parents, before rolling the respective dice in order to successfully breed pups. Should those foxes become parents in the next round, players will then continue to perform their experiments with the hopes of resulting in useful data to please their patrons and possibly win them the game.
Apart from designing The Fox Experiment and the beginner board game Wingspan, Hargrave has also created tabletop titles such as Mariposas, a board game about the migration patterns of the endangered Monarch Butterflies that has players attempt to generate victory points by planning for each new migration.
The Fox Experiment will be published by Pandasaurus Games, the company responsible for releasing the likes of family board game Machi Koro and the Dinosaur Island series, which has players becoming the managers of their own dangerous dino parks.
Wingspan is a board game for one to five players that challenges them to score points by attracting various types of birds into their habitats. Each round of the game will feature unique ways for players to score bonus points, with the aim of gaining new bird cards and playing them on their board by paying the required food tokens. Once players have birds on their board, they will be able to place eggs on them in order to fulfill scoring requirements for the round and overall game.
A Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for The Fox Experiment is set to launch on September 6th, with pledge amounts and delivery dates yet to be confirmed.