Grassvasion: The Potential of Board Games in Environmental Education with Liz Baldwin

Liz Baldwin is an associate professor at the School of Government and Public Policy and conducts research on environmental, water, and energy policy in the U.S. and abroad.

Recently, she has helped to develop Grassvasion, a board game based on Buffelgrass management in Tucson designed to illustrate concepts of interest in managing environmental issues and encouraging cooperation. 

Here we sit down with Baldwin to learn about what the board game is, how it came about, and the potential of board games generally as tools for environmental education and broadening perspectives for different actors.

How are you involved with Grassvasion?

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I never really expected to be doing research on invasive species policy and management, but not long after I arrived in Tucson, over 10 years ago now, I learned about the Buffelgrass issue and was eventually successful in applying for a grant from the National Science Foundation that gave me about $1.6 million to study Buffelgrass from a socio-ecological perspective with an interdisciplinary team including plant demographers and social scientists. 

"We call (Grassvasion) semi-cooperative. Players win as individuals, but if the saguaro on the board catches on fire, everybody loses collectively. It's communicating that basic idea that if we don't manage this grass and this fire, it will destroy really important parts of our community, and then we all lose together."

-Liz Baldwin, SGPP Associate Professor

We really dug in, and Grassvasion kind of came out of that project. My colleague Adam Henry had an idea to see if we could model Buffelgrass within an agent-based modeling framework, where the Buffelgrass has its agency to respond ecologically to different stimuli. Then humans have agency to respond to the buffelgrass according to different resources, constraints, and motivations that they would have. 

At some point along the way, Adam said, "Oh, you know what? I think I'd like to do this as a game where people could kind of try to figure out how to manipulate the actors.”

That sparked something in me. I thought, "Oh, while he's working on that, we could make a tabletop board game that would illustrate these principles.” It sounded like a lot of fun.

My son-in-law happens to be an aspiring board game designer, and a fairly serious one, so we've been working together, where I've been teaching him about the natural and social sciences, and he has been translating that into a board game that is fun to play and well-designed.

What is Grassvasion, and how is it played?

I'll use some terms that we use in the board gaming world, and I can explain what they mean as we go along. Grassvasion is an asymmetric role-playing game, and what that means is you've got a tableau with different land types. We've got parkland, ranchland, urban land, and unoccupied land. 

Four players play, and each plays a different role. There's a park ranger, a rancher, an activist, and a scientist. Each of those roles has different abilities and choices that they can make on any given turn. They're playing on a tabletop where grass is invading, and depending on weather conditions, fire can occur wherever there's grass.

These four players have to try to figure out how to achieve their individual goals while also managing the grass. 

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The thing I think is very innovative about Grassvasion that I don't see in a lot of other games is that we call it semi-cooperative. Players win as individuals, but if the saguaro on the board catches on fire, everybody loses collectively. It's communicating that basic idea that if we don't manage this grass and this fire, it will destroy really important parts of our community, and then we all lose together.

A lot of really good educational games, like Wingspan and Photosynthesis, illustrate ecological principles. Grassvasion is a little bit different because it's much more about collective action. How do you get these different actors with their different individual motivations, goals, resources, and capabilities together to manage this ecological problem?

Something that I think is unique, and I kind of see it as a trend in board games, but I think that we're on the leading edge of it, is this tension between individual action and collective action: are you going to do the thing that gets you the most points, or are you going to do the thing that is best for managing this shared landscape? That is at the heart of this question about buffelgrass. 

Are we going to devote the resources that it takes to manage this shared problem? Or are we all going to just kind of play our own individual dreams, wake up one day, and find that the Sonoran Desert is gone?

Could you give me a rundown of just buffelgrass as a problem in Tucson?

Buffelgrass is this grass that was imported from Kenya in the 1930s in response to, at that time, really widespread erosion. There had been overgrazing, and extension officers were looking for a miracle grass that would rejuvenate the desert. 

People basically went out worldwide to try to figure out what grasses do really well in arid climates. Bufflegrass was never a miracle, but it helped with that erosion.

Then in 1994, we started having fires in the desert, when the Sonoran Desert historically is pretty close to fireproof, and people were realizing that something was wrong. People have begun to realize that these invasive grasses and other invasive plants are transforming our fire risk.

I go out with firefighters, and they say things to me like, “The fires that we are dealing with now are not the same as the fires that we used to have and that we're trained to have.” Our inland firefighters, for the most part, are trained to deal with structure fires, but now they need to be prepared to deal with invasive grass-fueled fires in washes and in the high-density wildland-urban interface.

"I wonder, in the era of climate change, should we be thinking about games as a way to simulate future challenges and how we might address them?"

-Liz Baldwin, SGPP Associate Professor

How do you see the future of Grassvasion as far as ambitions and end goals?

Well, the goal is to get it published. This summer, we submitted Grassvasion to Central Michigan Press, which, as far as I know, is the world's only academic press that publishes scholarly games.

They had it reviewed by both a scholar and a game designer. We have officially been given a “revise and resubmit.” The game designer identified a number of ways that we might be able to improve on the game, so that's what we're doing right now.

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The AIR Annual Resilience Grant is really helping us play the game with lots of people and think about how we might redesign it to address the concerns and the suggestions raised by this reviewer.

I expect sometime in the summer to resubmit. If they say yes, that will be very exciting because that means that they will publish it and help produce and distribute it.

It’d be my hope that if you go to Saguaro National Park or the Desert Museum, they would have this game for sale on their store shelves.

Are there any distinct advantages of board games in this kind of education that you've come across?

One of the things that I'm doing with Grassvasion is trying to figure out if we can measure people's learning from playing the game. What I'm discovering is that one case is where people know nothing about buffelgrass, and then they know something after playing the game. However, sometimes people already know a lot about buffelgrass, and when they play the game, it's much harder to detect how their attitudes have changed. 

I'm interested in taking the game next to conservation professionals and people who work on buffelgrass, and have them play the game as different roles, and see whether it gives them new insights.

For example, if in real life someone is a park ranger, but they play the rancher, does that role-playing aspect, or even just the strategic thinking aspect, make any difference?

The Department of Defense uses war games to try to prepare for things that might happen strategically, and I wonder, in the era of climate change, should we be thinking about games as a way to simulate future challenges and how we might address them?

Something that I didn't really expect was that in thinking through how to simplify the core features of the problem for purposes of the game, it actually gave me new theoretical insights into how I wanted to write, research, and publish this.

I've been writing and publishing for academic audiences about environmental issues for my entire career, and the more I get into the buffelgrass issue, the more I want to produce things that people in my community would be able to access and appreciate. A board game, compared to an academic article, feels like something that people in Tucson might be able to interact with to engage with this problem in a meaningful way.