by Trevor Benjamin

Under the Leaves is a cozy "take and make" game for 2-4 players. Each turn, you add a tile to your personal garden, attracting birds, bees, and a host of adorable little creatures known as dwellers. The player with the most inhabited garden wins!

This is the story of how the game came to be and of some of the key lessons we learned along the way.

Abundance — More, More, More!

Brett and I wanted to make a game about "abundance", a game that can simply and continually reward you for playing and for finding combinations of plays turn-by-turn that can reward you even more. This spirit led us to the game's setting: a garden overflowing with a rich biodiversity of wildlife.

So let's start with the bees...

Each tile has four spaces showing plant types of different colors. (Some also include a puddle in one corner, but more about those later.) Each time you create an area of three or more connected spaces of the same color, the area attracts a bee and becomes pollinated — and if you have any other pollinated areas of the same color, each of them attracts another bee!

You just played the left-most tile (1) and created a new area of three pink plants. This area immediately attracts a bee (2) and becomes pollinated. You already have two other pollinated pink areas, so this is a great move, with each of these immediately attractint another bee! That's three bees in one go. Well done!
Next there are the hummingbirds...

In the middle of every tile is a nest, and when all of the areas of planting around the nest have becomes pollinated, this attracts a hummingbird. If you ever have hummingbirds in a line of three neighboring nests, you attract another hummingbird to the nest in the middle.

You just played the right-most tile (1) and created a newly pollinated area of orange plants. All of the plants around the nest on the neighboring tile are now pollinated, so the nest attracts a hummingbird (2), and that means you've attracted hummingbirds to three nests in a row, so you attract a second hummingbird to the nest in the middle! (3) Maybe you're starting to see the pattern of abundance that we wanted the game to deliver. Each small achievement has the potential to create extra achievement elsewhere.
These twin geographies — the areas of planting, and the network of spots in the middle of the tiles — were present from the first playtest of the first prototype (seen below), even while the other details of the gameplay continued to change around them (of course!) as we playtested and discovered how these elemental pieces fit together.

Another foundational design goal that drove the shape of the entire game from the beginning was our desire to keep the scoring simple — really simple. It seemed obvious to us that the success of each player's garden should have exactly one metric: its abundance. And a garden should be measured in the most linear and straightforward way possible: Count up everything in your garden up at game's end, and the player with the most creatures wins.


Also present from the start — although perhaps not so clearly defined — was another little family of creatures which eventually became what the game now calls the "dwellers". These are the charming and whimsical garden denizens that can see on the wonderful cover art.

The leaf, mushroom, and puddle dwellers are each attracted to just the right pattern of habitat, and for the gamers amongst you, here the game delivers some simple but playful variability since in each game you randomly choose a different combination of these patterns.

Big Turns, Little Turns!

In summary, each tile placed can lead to a host of new life coming to your garden: Plants beget bees, which can beget more bees; bees beget birds — which can beget more birds! The patterns of habitat you create can beget leaf, mushroom, and puddle dwellers, and finally, the player with the most dwellers of each type begets even more!

With this many combo opportunities, the game promises turns in which you attract a slew of animals to your garden. But you will also have smaller turns that are merely stepping stones towards the next big play. This mix of big turns and little turns gives the game a satisfying ebb and flow.

Indeed, "Big turns, little turns" has become a mantra that we continue to use while developing many of our games!


Kill Your Darlings!

This probably sounds like plain and entirely painless sailing as if the game arrived almost done. In some ways, that's true: I think we did have a clear picture from the start — but some sacrifices were yet to be made.

Early in the game's development, each of the five planting types had a single totemic hero piece: a "bird" whose plumage handily matched the color of the plants. Each time you created or expanded an area of one color, you would compare its size to all similar areas across all players' gardens. If your area was the biggest, you would attract the matching bird, luring it away from its current home.

And here's the thing: Everyone loved them! Playtesters loved the story, the chunky pieces, and the direct interaction their presence brought to the game — which is great if you like that sort of thing.

The problem was that the game didn't love them. Rather than making lots of smaller areas to attract that wonderful abundance of smaller creatures, the mere presence of these bigger totems encouraged every player to grow larger — and larger! and larger! — areas to first grab them, then to stop anyone else doing the same, drawing focus away from the core experience we were trying to craft.

A classic piece of creative wisdom — and surely the most universal? — is "kill your darlings". No matter how much you love something, if it fights against the core of what you are trying to create, you have to let it go. With Under the Leaves, we learned that sometimes you have to kill your playtesters' darlings, too!

Pitch to Exciting New Publishers!

In the lead-up to SPIEL Essen 23, José at Fractal Juegos reached out to Brett via BGG GeekMail. Fractal Juegos is a Chilean publisher that localizes games for the Chilean market, but which had recently also started to make original games and were keen to meet with designers. We were delighted to be able to sit down with them one morning in the then-still-quiet Hall 1 (before all the punters streamed in).

The meeting went really well, and we could see how passionate José was about making games. We pitched a few different ideas and Under the Leaves (then called "The Birds and the Bees") seemed like a great fit. Not only did José and the rest of the team enjoy the game, they had some great ideas about how to improve it. Most importantly, they wanted to move away from our decidedly bucolic but somewhat plainly drawn and parochial "English country garden" setting to something with more character and flavor, now brought to vivid life in the wonderful illustrations by Paulina Victoria.

It has been a real pleasure developing Under the Leaves, and working with Fractal Juegos to bring it to life. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

Trevor Benjamin