by Nick Hayes

I'm Nick Hayes, manager of product design on the games team at Mattel. You may know me from some of my other games, such as Utopia Engine, UNO: Show 'Em No Mercy, and Chunky Fighters.

Mattel is known for mass-market games like UNO, Skip-Bo, Pictionary, and Scrabble, but what you might not know is that many of the designers on our team are longtime game enthusiasts. We come back from SPIEL and Gen Con every year with stacks of new games and slowly chip away at the pile in our free time throughout the year — and in between it all, we design kids and family games for decidedly non-gaming audiences.

But for a brief time from 2013 through 2018, Mattel dipped its toes into hobby market games. For us game designers, it was great to be able to work on games with complex components, deeper gameplay, and inventive themes. We even won the Kinderspiel des Jahres in 2014 for Ghost Fightin' Treasure Hunters!

Today I'd like to tell you the story of how a small two-player game, released at the tail end of that experiment, used a handful of colorful stones and a laughing dog to unexpectedly win the hearts of many and earn itself a re-release in 2025.


Some History

The original Spirits of the Wild was released in 2018 alongside Voltage, Trailmazer, and Blokus Duo as a line of two-player strategy games for Mattel Games.

Spirits of the Wild was available in the U.S. on Amazon and at Target for $14.99, but word of mouth surrounding the game moved too slowly for the fast-moving mass-market shelves. Before long, the game migrated to the clearance racks — and that is where many of its current fans discovered it.


Those who played the original game appreciated it for its light rules, relaxing gameplay, and sturdy, sculpted components. By the time fans began to spread the word on BGG, the game had disappeared from retail entirely.

From Clearance Bin to Grail Game

After retail death, Spirits of the Wild saw an afterlife in game cafés and recommendation threads on Reddit and BGG. Fans of the game suggested it to folks looking for an approachable, two-player affair they could enjoy with a partner, or as a quick game before bed, or as a little head-to-head diversion while waiting for another table to free up at a meetup.

During this time, the remaining copies of the initial print run made their way to the secondhand market where they slowly began creeping up in price. Copies of Spirits of the Wild began sweetening math trades and averaging $50-$60 on eBay (with that price dropping by the minute as you read this).


Throughout those lean years, folks hoping to track down a copy to play lamented having to fork over a hefty sum for such a small game, and aside from one small German-only reprint in 2020, there were no plans to relaunch the game in English...and this at a time when "Duel"-style games were growing in popularity.

The Spark

Enter an unlikely hero. Adam Sadiq joined the Mattel games team as a marketing manager for the strategy games business. He is also a passionate gamer, and one day, after a game of Spirits of the Wild, he offered a genius idea: Why not break up the game boards into individual animal boards, introduce new animals, and let players mix and match?

A chance to revisit my favorite game? Say no more. I started work immediately.


More of Everything

The first thing we noticed? The individual animal boards were fantastic. You could play each session with an entirely new set of animals or swap out just one or two. Each mix felt different, but because the core rules of the game didn't change, there was no real learning curve. Part of the fun became discovering interesting new combinations.

And since we were adding new animal boards, why stop there?


One of the most common comments in the forums has been, "I wish there were more than six spirit power cards." This was my opportunity to add more.

We ended up testing 30-40 new spirit power cards. By the end of development, we ended up tripling the total number of both the animal boards and the spirit power cards compared to the original game.

When Do You Stop Designing?

There is a real danger in design when you start thinking "What could I add?" because you often don't stop to ask, "What should I add?" It's easy to design variations, but not every variation is useful. Not every difference is interesting.

The work of playtesting is weeding out what is duplicative and keeping in what is fun — but even then, you don't always catch everything.

Let me show you an example that almost made it into the game: the Eagle and the Elk.


The Eagle is from the original game, while the Elk is a new card.

I explored so many different iterations of the Elk during development that I ended up with tunnel vision on this card. As it evolved, I continued to think of it as a unique and powerful card. It wasn't until I was reviewing the final rulebook, where both cards are listed side by side, that I noticed the Elk was actually just a bad version of the Eagle — and this almost made it to print!

The final Elk card is much better

The Cutting Room Floor

Not every new thing we tested made it into the final game.

One thing I had toyed around with was some stones being more valuable than others. As it currently stands, you have little reason to pick one color over another at the start of the game. The value of individual colors develops during play...but what if some stones had powers attached to them from the beginning?


I created a cycle of cards based on seasons and natural events. These cards added bonus actions and scoring incentives to certain stone colors. Do you take that white stone you need to complete your three-of-a-kind? Or do you take the purple to cement your majority for a nice endgame bonus?

These cards changed the dynamic of the game, but it was too much. Gameplay slowed down as players really had to consider their options each turn. The game went from a light, back-and-forth jaunt to a grueling, mental wrestling match. In the end, we felt these cards made the game much heavier than we wanted, so we left them out.

Changing Colors

The last thing I wanted to update were the stone colors. While designing the original game, I had spent hours thumbing through digital swatches looking for the right combination of colors. I wanted a modern palette that looked great on the dark animal boards and created a specific vibe. When I found the right mix, I knew it right away.


But when those colors were translated into plastic, the vibrant, modern colors I saw on screen turned into so many pastel Skittles. They were also bad in low light and for players with colorblindness.

For Spirits of the Wild: Awakening, I wanted to steer away from modern colors refocus on nature: yellow for pollen, purple for flowers, blue turquoise, white shell, black obsidian. The red I picked comes from the scales of the Sonoran coral snake.


I also paid special attention to colorblind accessibility. In many games, designers can use double-coding to make color information more discernible, but for Spirits of the Wild: Awakening, we couldn't add unique decorations to the individual stones. Printing on each stone would have been very expensive, and molding the stones with different shapes or textural elements could allow players to feel the different colors before pulling them out of the bag.

The next best thing I could do was pick colors that had the highest chance of being discernible to players with different forms of colorblindness. Chromatic Vision Simulator allowed me to tweak the stones' hues and values until I had something that is hopefully playable by as many people as possible.


New Artwork

For this new edition, we had the opportunity to work with the talented Rachel Quinlan. Our senior packaging designer Jeff Ipjian actually came across Rachel's work in the Artist's Alley at Gen Con in 2024. They struck up a conversation that ultimately led him to proposing Rachel as the lead artist for Spirits of the Wild: Awakening.

Rachel's whimsical take on the spirit animals was a fantastic fit. Here are some of my favorites:


Spirits of the Wild: Awakening

Spirits of the Wild: Awakening will be available to purchase in Q4 2025. For those of you attending Gen Con in August, we will have it ready for you at the booth to demo or buy.

And for those of you who had been hoping to track down the original game, you'll be glad to know that all of the original animals and spirit power cards are included in this new edition, so you can experience the original game as well as all the new content.

Wrapping It All Up

I still enjoy playing Spirits of the Wild — and this in spite of all the office play sessions, all the development playtesting, and even all the solo playtesting in which I had to pretend to be two people. I feel like this is a good sign, at least.

If you happen to see me at a convention sometime, you have my express permission to interrupt whatever I am doing and say hi. I'm always happy to talk games, design, or just sit down and play a few rounds.

Nick Hayes