The Atiwa Range is an area of south-eastern Ghana in Africa, consisting of hills with steep slopes and relatively flat peaks. Much of the chain includes an evergreen forest reserve, home to many endangered species. Logging, bushmeat hunting and gold and bauxite mining are putting great pressure on the reserve.
Meanwhile, the mayor of the neighboring town of Kibi causes excitement by sheltering a large group of flying foxes in his garden. He has recognized the value of these animals in deforested areas of our planet: flying foxes sleep during the day and go hunting for food at sunset, searching for fruit trees many kilometers away. On their way home, they separate the kernels from the eaten fruit, spreading them over a large area: one colony of 150,000 flying foxes can afforest an area of up to 2,000 hectares per year.
In the game you have 3 workers, with whom you can perform 3 actions each round. For example, you can develop your city with terrain and location maps. Each of them offers different fields where you can keep families, animals, trees, fruit and especially flying foxes. An ingenious mechanism with action field tiles ensures that the action fields differ slightly from each other per round.
Some actions are bad for the environment. This is represented by pollution tokens that you receive as a result of the action. You must place these on spaces of your terrain and location cards, making them unusable until the end of the game. After performing your regular action, you may also perform a flying fox action if you can, but that is optional.
After all players have deployed their workers, the maintenance phase follows. Animals reproduce, families need to eat and fruit grows on trees. One of the most thematic details of the game lies in the training of families. Knowledgeable families automatically receive income, untrained families have to work for their gold with all the negative consequences for the environment.
Atiwa is a beautiful board game by the famous game author Uwe Rosenberg. He has managed to transform a current and important topic into a tough strategic game in a very thematic manner. The game contains an appendix, in which the author further explains the theme and shows how he incorporated the various details into the game.