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In 2005, Elizabeth Hargrave was enjoying a ski retreat in Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, with the young adult group from her Washington, D.C., congregation, All Souls Church, Unitarian.
There was just one problem: the winter weather.
As a long-time Floridian, Hargrave wasn’t eager to brave the cold and snow. So, she chose to stay inside instead and play board games.
She didn’t know it at the time, but this first foray into the world of board gaming would eventually lead to a full-time career in board game design and her award-winning game about birds, Wingspan, which, along with its expansions, has sold over 2.5 million copies.
Some of Elizabeth Hargrave's games.
Hargrave has received international recognition for creating beautiful and unique games about nature-related topics—including 2020’s Mariposas, where you guide a family of monarch butterflies on their migration, and her newest, 2024’s Undergrove, in which you play as a Douglas fir trying to get seedlings started with the help of a symbiotic relationship with mushrooms. And her work, partially shaped by her upbringing as a Unitarian Universalist, has also helped spur change in the board game industry, making it more diverse and inclusive.
Hargrave spent most of her childhood in Gainesville, Florida, where she attended the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville. She felt a strong connection to the UU church and thought of herself as a spiritual seeker, so much so that she briefly considered becoming a UU minister. However, after deciding in college that she wasn’t gregarious enough to enjoy leading a congregation, she opted for a career in public policy.
It wasn’t until years later, when a high school friend described his experience testing and providing feedback on a newly developed board game, that she realized board game design was a potential field of interest.
“That was the first time that it occurred to me that people make games, that they don’t just spring into the world fully formed,” Hargrave said.
Her imagination was further sparked when her husband suggested creating a board game about birds. Many of the board games that she had encountered at t
he time focused on a handful of similar themes, such as space travel, trains, and castles. But the Seventh Principle of Unitarian Universalism—respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part—had always resonated with Hargrave, and the idea of making something that emphasized nature and interconnectedness appealed to her.
“At some point, my spouse actually said, ‘What if there was Race for the Galaxy [a popular space-themed board game] but with birds?’” Hargrave recalled. “That was the immediate spark that got me to start” designing Wingspan.
After much testing and revision on Hargrave’s part, Wingspan was published in 2019. It has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Kennerspiel des Jahres and the American Tabletop Awards: Best Strategy Game. The game imagines that each player is the proprietor of a wildlife preserve and must attract birds to different habitats within that preserve. Each bird is represented by its own colorfully illustrated card that also shares a fact about that specific species.
Wingspan’s success was not only an accomplishment for Hargrave—it also furthered a shift toward more diversity within the board game industry.
A diversity of themes was already starting to happen, but Wingspan helped show publishers that there is an appetite for games about “more unusual subjects,” Hargrave said. Some publishers, she said, have started “to ask, ‘How can we hook up with new designers who are doing unusual stuff?’” These publishers are interested in people coming from different backgrounds, she added, and are now asking such questions as who “will help us reach more diverse audiences?’”
Jamey Stegmaier is the co-founder and president of Stonemaier Games—the company that published Wingspan—and he notes that although there has long been a wide variety of themes within tabletop games, Hargrave’s work is making a long-term impact.
”Wingspan is far from the first successful tabletop game with a strong nature theme or by an amazing woman designer,” Stegmaier said via email. “That said, Wingspan has reached a lot of people—the 2 millionth copy of the game is currently in print—so I think there’s a high likelihood that it has inspired people in various ways.”
Hargrave gravitated toward a service-oriented career in college partially because of the messages about social justice and activism that she heard at the Gainesville fellowship, and that inclination has followed her into her work as a game designer. In addition to challenging the status quo with her designs, Hargrave has also advocated making the entire board game industry more equitable and inclusive.
For example, she is currently helping to start a trade organization for board game designers. After seeing that the industry operated largely on a word-of-mouth network, she realized that new designers without many industry contacts are at a disadvantage. She hopes that the organization will help them access resources and information about the business side of board game design, such as how to read a contract and navigate financial dealings with publishers.
And after consistently hearing the incorrect refrain that she was one of the only women designing board games, she created a platform on her website to share the work of women, nonbinary, and Black designers.
“Elizabeth Hargrave is a powerful advocate for marginalized and underrepresented voices in the tabletop game industry and community—she’s the type of person who lifts up others with her,” Stegmaier said. “So, I do see both her, Wingspan, and her other games having a long-term impact on the game industry.”
Hargrave said she has “a fundamental belief that as we diversify the pool of designers, we will see games that serve people with different perspectives and help everybody find the game that's right for them, and that will broaden the pool of people who are gaming, which then becomes a virtuous cycle.” As a result, the industry will get “designers from that larger pool,” she added, “instead of being stuck in a feedback loop.”