Defenders of the Wild

The makers of Parks’ new game, Defenders of the Wild, wears its influences on its sleeves. It combines the cooperative anti-colonialism of Spirit Island, the asymmetric woodland factions of Root, and the mech-futuristic battles of Scythe. All this is wrapped up in a contained package with a more family friendly complexity – something closer to Pandemic – than these bigger and heavier games. Despite the streamlining, it manages to introduce some fresh surprises to the formula, and provides a strong base for future expansions.

Play takes place on a randomised hexagonal grid, composed of various habitats surrounding a ‘machine core’ – the headquarters of a mech race hell-bent on paving over the environs with walls, mechs, pollution and factories. The native peoples are a diverse set of animal sects, sorted not by species but by their allegiance to four richly themed factions. We have communities of witches, bureaucrats, rebels and scientists to choose from, each calling one of the four habitats their home.

Invaded by lumbering sentient engines and bots, these distinct cultures must come together to defeat the common enemy. Players must together navigate the board building support by doing the usual good vibes eco-warrior things – cleaning up pollution, destroying polluters, blowing up walls and, eventually, rewilding the colonised squares back into verdant bliss. Meanwhile, between turns the engines chug around the board creating ecological problems for the players to solve. To win, every faction must reach full strength by building out camps across the board – only possible with enough support – and keeping the machines at bay by rewilding all its factories.

But though cooperative, this is teamwork with caveats. There are limits to how these distrustful colleagues can communicate their plans. Each faction is headed up by one of two leaders – represented by some gorgeous wooden woodland figures – that come with their own unique defender card deck. Defenders are your factions supporters, the band of rebels whose services you’ll use to win. Each round and before taking any actions, all players must choose a defender each granting a numbers of actions and special abilities. On the one hand this provides the group with a wide array of tools to fulfil their many goals – but on the other the defender cards cannot be discussed. So while the group may vaguely discuss who will do what, defenders must be chosen independently.

This leaves the action economy available each round just out of sight, with the specifics of players’ plans left to guesswork, empathy or selfishness. There are thorny trade-offs to consider. Better special abilities come on cards with fewer actions, so more often than not taking the most helpful actions means giving up on achieving much that turn. Give everyone a healing hand, or take more actions and keep the potions to yourself? Even the order of actions can be uncertain, with some defenders forcing the ‘first player’ marker to be passed round – a marker that moves delightfully unpredictably if multiple players have the same idea.

This is a system with a lot of promise, and speaks to an optimistic view of coordination challenges. The problem is not divergent goals, but a genuine inability to articulate across the divide about what you need and what I can offer. This is a nice touch – while in most asymmetric games learning the rules of others’ factions is a burden, here your growing understanding of what the opposite factions are capable of is not part of the teach but of a story about building trust and familiarity in a world of hardship. Layered under that, the defenders card communication restrictions feels apt for a game of improvised guerrilla warfare, a simulation not just of distrustful alliances but of hectic underground communication.

Defenders of the Wild can run into problems at lower player counts – at two, players get turns too frequently and cover too much of the board to run into the grittiest coordination issues, and can generally get on with it by themselves. This isn’t helped by the pedestrian nature of some of the defender cards, many of which simply amount to an extra action here and there rather than playing more meaningfully with the game state. It feels like there’s more design space to explore here.

But at four, it comes alive. Seemingly innocuous actions have more chances to disrupt others, and can combine in more ways than at two. But it’s not just that – with more pieces on the board the map starts to feel cramped and players’ possibilities start to intertwine.

One key example of this is camps. Each faction must build out their camps to sustain the board presence that can keep the engines in check – but these are also utilities for players, as ending up in one grants the faction camp’s unique resource. As walls and factories come out the board becomes a hellscape – but also a patchwork of havens that can be thought of makeshift weapon factories, healing tents, or soup kitchens. With more players putting more of these on the board, movement can become an intricate tactical game as factions try to make best use of one another.

When it works, it really works. Factions start the game unaware and independent of their comrades, but towards the end, as the fine line between victory and failure gets thinner, players’ accumulated understanding and complex network of helping hands becomes fundamental to success. And then the game twists the knife. When you build all your camps, you’re out of the game. Factions do their bit, and no more. All communal spirit ebbs away, and it’s left to remaining players and the machines. It’s a bold, cold choice, characteristic of a game with more than just optimism about cooperation in war. Left behind players have to watch on – wondering, in case of a loss, whether they should have done more.

There are a few minor hiccups. The support building mechanism is sometimes odd – you can’t build support without fighting the machines, leaving players occasionally waiting for bad things to happen so enough support can be built. This mostly goes away at higher difficulty levels, but feels like a thematic contradiction. Then there’s replay value – unfamiliarity with the defender decks is part of the joy, so just two decks per faction means regular players will usually know what’s coming. More defender cards and randomised decks composed from a larger total pool would be a welcome expansion, to keep the secret asymmetry fresh.

But these are quibbles – Defenders of the Wild is a solid cooperative game with ample room for growth, capturing some of the tensions of bigger and longer games in a more streamlined and teachable package, while adding some genuinely surprising twists.

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