Tabletop_Gaming__Issue_27__February_2019

Elizabeth Hargrave shakes

o the down in her gorgeous

board game debut, Wingspan.

e designer and lead artist

Natalia Rojas crack open the

shell of their creation

Words by Matt Jarvis

Elizabeth Hargrave shakes

o the down in her gorgeous

board game debut, Wingspan.

e designer and lead artist

Natalia Rojas crack open the

shell of their creation

24 February 2019

A

single conversation with

Elizabeth Hargrave can see the

designer wax lyrical about the

meanings assigned to owers

by Victorians, the migration

of monarch butteries and

a decades-long Russian

experiment involving the

genetic domestication of foxes.

All three of these seemingly unconnected topics

have inspired games designed by Hargrave. 19th

century oriculture was the basis of Tussie-Mussie,

the micro ‘I split, you choose’ card game designed

in a month that won last year’s GenCan’t Design

Contest and announced Hargrave to the gaming scene.

Buttery migration and fox taming, meanwhile, serve

as her leaping-o points for two upcoming designs still

in the works.

“I keep a running list of game ideas or theme ideas

• often it’s just like a couple words about a theme or a
  link to an article I read or something,” she says. “I tend
  to just sort of see something in the world and it triggers
  an idea in me about how that might play out in a game.
  “I had Victorian ower language on that list. I had
  been playing a lot of New York Slice with a friend of
  mine’s kids, which is classic ‘I split, you choose’. I was
  trying to think about whether there was a way to use
  the mechanic to make an 18-card game feel bigger.”