Wingspan designer’s The Fox Experiment helps evolve nature-themed board games

polygon.com:

With the creation of Wingspan, the delightful ornithology-themed board game released in 2019, designer Elizabeth Hargrave helped give birth to the modern-day genre of nature-themed board games. Its success, buoyed by dozens of industry awards and all manner of mainstream media attention, has opened the door to dozens of similar games, from Meadowto Forest Shuffle. Now the acclaimed designer has leveraged that creative capital to delve ever deeper down a scientific rabbit hole. How deep? Well, her latest game is focused on an obscure Soviet effort to domesticate wild foxes… and it’s not half bad.

The Fox Experiment is based on a controversial project funded by the Soviet Union in 1958, with scientists using selective breeding in the hopes of transforming a wild species into a domesticated partner. Hargrave’s design, however, is not at all concerned with the political, historical, and moral ramifications of that project. Instead, it focuses on tackling the technical matter at hand — the job of selectively breeding the friendliest foxes. Over multiple generations, players draft male and female foxes and then roll handfuls of dice based on their observable traits. These results are then filtered through their offspring, which in turn display a variety of desirable and undesirable traits of their own. These pups are then selectively bred to create the next litter of cubs, creating a core loop of play that is both satisfying and evocative of the experiment being modeled.

The system is smart and straightforward. Dice are colored and represent various desired traits, such as fluffy tails and floppy ears. These map to the qualities seen in the Russian genetic experiment. As foxes become more friendly to humans over subsequent