Photo Opportunity

In some board games, the theme is a fairly light gauze draped over a mechanical framework. Sometimes, though, the theme is such a compelling fit that you can't imagine the game existing without it. Photosynthesis is the latter kind of game.

Each player is custodian of a group of trees that they're cultivating for points inside a forested grove. Seeds grow into small trees, which can be grown larger and larger, until they can finally be harvested to increase your score. In each of their intermediate stages, the trees generate the energy that become your action points -- the means by which you spread new seeds, grow existing trees, or harvest.

But the real nugget at the heart of it all, locking all the flavor and mechanics into a compelling place, is the sun. The board is a large hexagon, and every round, the sun shines in from one corner, spreading in straight lines down two edges of the board. Your energy is only generated by trees that can see the sun. If a taller tree stands in the way, it casts shadow that blocks other trees in the line from doing anything. Every round, the sun rotates to a new point, so while one round could be very powerful for you, the next round might change fortunes entirely.

While I was playing Photosynthesis and trying to plan my next moves, I found myself thinking about the story wrapper of it all. The strategies you have to contemplate here feel very mechanical. There are a lot of ideas of area control at play here. Every space on the board has three things you have to account for -- how it will generate energy for you, how you might use it to block energy from opponents (through the casting of shadows), and how an eventual harvest in that location will score you points (as different spaces on the board are worth different amounts). You also have to think about how each space might play for you on future turns as the sun comes around to new locations.

On down time between turns, I found myself thinking about how much it all played like an abstract strategy game, something from the GIPF Project series, perhaps. And yet, without the metaphor of sun and trees and shade, the whole thing would hardly make sense. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a designer would ever even think to craft a board game this way without first having that story to underpin it all. And the components are really well made -- large, interlocking cardboard pieces that form a colorful "army" of trees.

The rulebook isn't quite as explicit on a few points as I think it ought to have been. In particular, the rules around spreading seeds from an existing tree into an empty space have been clarified in multiple threads on BoardGameGeek -- and getting them wrong (which we did, the first time) leads to a quite imbalanced way of exploiting the game. Still, there was much to appreciate here.

Provisionally, I'd give Photosynthesis a B+. But with multiple (correct) plays, I can only imagine that inching upward, not down.