From Prototype to Play: Olin Alum Blends Art, Science, and Fungi in Shroomscape
Inspired by her Olin experience, namely Olin's academic approach of combining the technical with the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, Camille Girard '21, a self-described "Fungi Fanatic," has just launched the tabletop game, Shroomscape: The Mycelium Mindset Board Game, on Kickstarter.
Many of the elements of the four-player game and the collaborative project that brought it to life map directly back to her time at Olin, and now, after three years of late-night tinkering, playtesting, and refinement, Camille and her two co-designers are inviting players to experience the full mushroom lifecycle!
Camille Girard '21 holds the new game, Shroomscape: The Mycelium Mindset Board Game.
Rooted in Olin: Designing a Game About How Everything Interconnects
Shroomscape invites players to grow networks underground, sprout Fruiting Bodies, and release Spores that can change the entire game, the designers say. Every play-through flips between competition, collaboration, and unpredictability, keeping sessions "fresh and strategic," and illustrating just how much thought and design went into making this fully illustrated, balanced, and production-ready game.
While in graduate school and as part of a collaborative thesis there, Camille joined up with two students to form The Interbeing Project - an exploration of sorts whose first product (a "sensory entanglement" as described on their site ) is this fungally fabulous 1-hour board game.
"The ethos around [The Interbeing Project] is really about our interconnection with everything around us and trying to create experiences, things, what have you, that invite people to be aware of, and to be intentional of, the way they coexist, and the way that they share space, and the way they interact with everything around them, especially the non-human," says Camille.
All the components of the tabletop game, Shroomscape, are shown against a black background.
The creators of the game all come from different disciplines, with Camille sharing that her experience, shaped at Olin by "physics and quantum, engineering, and theories about how we interact with the universe and the spaces around us," inspired and helped to grow the game's development.
"The courses at Olin where you're not only designing something, but thinking through all the different ways it'll interact with the world, directly sparked my interest in making this game and informed how we designed those interactive experiences into its gameplay" says Camille.
Progressing with the collaborative thesis and a conceptual topic of creating a board game based on the lifecycle of a mushroom, the designers conducted a series of experiments, which they say was an interesting merging of the hard sciences with the soft.
"The courses at Olin where you're not only designing something, but thinking through all the different ways that it'll interact with the world, directly sparked my interest in making the game and informed how we designed those interactive experiences into its gameplay" says Camille Girard '21.
Through these experiments, along with AI meditation, guided walks, and a variety of other testing, the team learned that really concrete and clear rules are a necessity for people to be able to step into ambiguous topics, such as celebrating the interconnectedness of ecosystems through a board game!
"We found if you give very specific instructions or a clear method for folks to play around with it, they responded much better and were able to access it easier," says Camille. Thinking about her Olin student experience helped to confirm this discovery and turned out to be beneficial when Camille and her co-designers were developing the structure of the game.
See the Shroomscape Rulebook (pdf)
"Being at Olin, there were so many D&D games, so many board games, video games, and I think you see it over and over again, these super analytical, really intelligent people do the goofiest, weirdest things when it's inside the structure of a game that allows people to feel totally free in this interesting way."
A person is shown playing the board game "Shroomscape."
So, why the mushrooms?
"The interconnection and the way mushrooms interact with the environment and with other species, and sort of in this very real way, we were inspired by it, and we found the game as the mechanism or the vehicle, and so it sort of all bridged together...then Shroomscape was born!" says Camille.
Creating Something That Matters — Not Just Something New
The design process of the game took three years, and a lot of the things learned and practiced at Olin - both the technical and the human-centered - were put into play.
"We built everything from scratch, so the Machine Shop skills and the rapid prototyping ability I learned at Olin definitely served me well. We made a prototype in, like, four hours, and then we kept iterating. We were laser cutting. We were sculpting. I CAD’d all the parts and worked with a manufacturing partner. We collaborated with a bunch of folks. We game tested, we play tested. All the approaches learned at Olin, where it's like iterate quickly and try things out, get feedback. We definitely did all of those things," says Camille.
Shroomscape is a game of mycelial growth and adaptation. Make like a mushroom, spread in unique patterns, connect with resources, and adapt to shifting conditions— with the ultimate aim to spore and survive!
This is the team's first experience with making their own product, designing it from scratch, and working with a manufacturer. But it's not the first time Camille has thought about it.
"Especially at Olin, I was always like “I'd love to design my own thing,” but I didn't want to just make something for the sake of making something. I wanted to make something that I was actually excited about, and that I felt like had some type of value in the world and wasn't just a doodad for people to buy. Something that connected to my values. And this game, I think, does all that."
From the Kickstarter: Now fully illustrated, balanced, and production-ready, Shroomscape is set to enter manufacturing as soon as the Kickstarter is funded. With its polished gameplay and striking design, the game makes a thoughtful fall or holiday gift for board game lovers, kids, mushroom enthusiasts, and anyone who enjoys a unique strategic challenge.
Make like a mushroom by following the project and learning more here...