Why Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave designed Sanibel for her dad

Wingspan, Elizabeth Hargrave’s 2019 board game about attracting birds to a wildlife preserve, was an instant success. Its eye-catching egg tokens and bird-feeder-shaped dice tower combined with elegant engine-building mechanics won it the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award and inspired numerous expansions introducing more types of birds along with spinoffs that have translated its rules to observing fish and raising dragons. Hargrave is now turning her love of nature to the seashore for Sanibel, a game about shell collecting that was just released on Jan. 16.

“When I’m not gaming, I’m often outside, and if I’m going to work on a game for a year, I want it to be about something I’m into,” Hargrave told Polygon in a video interview. “Nature, historically, has been a really untapped subject in board games, but there are a lot of systems in nature that are very parallel to the human systems we’ve been using for games for decades. There’s supply and demand, scarcity and abundance.”

Named for an island city on the Gulf Coast of Florida, Sanibel has two to four players competing to fill their bag-shaped game boards with tiles representing shells, shark teeth, starfish, and other things you might find on the beach. (The rules mention that you shouldn’t actually pick up living animals on the shore.) Each type of tile has its own scoring conditions, focused on collecting sets or building clusters. The tiles are randomly placed on different spots along the beach and players form strategies based on what’s available, what other players are drafting, and bonus objectives they get presented with.

“Scoring was something that we kept fiddling with, really trying to make sure that all the different types of shells were appealing in their own way,” Hargrave said. “Some of that was just mathing out the average number of points per turn, and some of that was just watching people playtest it and making sure that people were actually trying to go for different things and that they felt viable.”

Players move their meeples along a board representing the coast, and like in Tokaido, they can move at their own pace. You can race ahead of competition to ensure you get a shell you really need for a set, or visit more spots to fill your bag, banking on earning points picking up tiles others aren’t as excited about. A wave token also moves with the players, periodically triggering the placement of more tiles on the map (representing the tides washing new shells onto the shore). While there’s plenty of strategy involved, the game is easy to learn and can be played in about 45 minutes.

“Sanibel is actually a game that my dad suggested. He loves collecting shark teeth and shells,” Hargrave said. “I definitely wanted this to be at a difficulty level where my dad, who is not a gamer, could play it. I hope that I have hit the sweet spot where the rules are pretty intuitive, but there’s a lot to think about on your turn to play it well.”

Image: Avalon Hill

Hargrave took a similar approach to making Wingspan because she wanted the game to appeal to birders with little board game experience, while publisher Stonemaier Games was looking for a title with the complexity that would appeal to fans of its hit game Scythe.

“I think that tension made [Wingspan] land in a really good place in the end where, if you’re motivated by the birds, you might put in the extra effort to learn a game that you wouldn’t otherwise have learned, and then you’re hooked because it’s such a satisfying engine builder and it feels great,” Hargrave said. “I was actually terrified when it was coming out that I would have gotten something horribly wrong, and [birders] would be mad at me, but I have only heard delight. People are really excited to have a board game about birds. Who would have thought?”

Hargrave’s nature-themed games have proven especially popular since COVID-19 increased interest in both board games and spending time outdoors. Hargrave said her Washington, DC mushrooming club doubled its membership during the pandemic. Now that people can gather with friends again, they still want to play games, and that’s expanding the hobby even more.

“Games are so much easier to learn from other people,” Hargrave said. “Once you reach a critical mass, you can get to the point where people are spreading it, and then there’s a much lower barrier to entry.”