This past week at pray & play, we were getting together the day after Earth Day and the day before Arbor Day (apparently a US only holiday? who knew). So I thought we’d go thematic this week, and make Minimalist Baker’s Mango (clean) Energy Balls and Dirt Cake, and play some CO2: Second Chance & Forest Shuffle! Check out the At a Glance tables for the stats and links to the recipes, read on for the details!

At a Glance…

Snacks

Dirt Cake is not the most visually appealing, lol, but add some sprigs of mint to it and it makes it look so much more authentic and colorful! But let’s back up. This dessert is tasty, but takes some serious planning! Step 1: refrigerate your can of coconut milk overnight, but also have some Coco Whip on hand as a backup 🫣. Step 2: (early in the morning!) Cook the cornstarch, sugar, and milk in a pan until it thickens up like a pudding and refrigerate for 2-3 hours. (Or do what I did and get most of the way done and get your husband to finish it up while you teach class haha). Step 3: after teaching said class, walking the dog, and having a quick meeting, try to make the whipped cream. This is a very delicate process btw. If your can of coconut milk was too old or not refrigerated enough or just feeling uncooperative that day, it is possible it will not separate. Don’t panic! This is why you have the Coco Whip! Or, you can make the mistake I did and even when it did separate, you dig too deep into the can and accidentally get some slightly liquid-y coconut, rendering it unwhippable and reminding me of the dangers of digging too deep into things… (“The Dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm… shadow and flame.” LOTR, Tolkein) Luckily no Balrogs were awoken, but it did mean I ended up adding some Coco Whip to support my droopy coconut. Step 4: Beat the cream cheese with powdered sugar and mix with pudding and cool whip. Step 5: Blend Oreos (gf as needed), trying to restrain yourself from eating too many. It’s ok if they aren’t blended perfectly. There are now rocks in your dirt. Nature. Layer half the oreos, all the pudding-y stuff, and the rest of the Oreos and refrigerate for 6-8 hours, or freeze. I tried refrigerating for about 5.5 hours or so, freezing the last half hour, then took it out half an hour before serving. I thought this would make it a more traditional ‘dirt cake’ texture, more pudding-y. If that’s your jam, go for that. Personally, I’m pretty anti pudding, purely on the basis of texture. I froze the little that was left and had it the next day and it was much more to my liking frozen. Try it both ways and see what you think! Either way I got lots of compliments! While there were lots of steps that entailed several hours of wait time, as long as you plan ahead it’s actually not difficult and was quite tasty! Would recommend!!

My Ninja was once more put to use with the Mango Energy Balls. (Get yours here!) Honestly, I’m not sure if a more high powered blender would have done a better job or if I was just impatient and should’ve scrapped the sides more. What ended up happening was the mango and dates would just stick to the sides of my blender since they were so wet and sticky, and therefore had great difficulty reaching the blades to blend. Luckily you blend the nuts first, then the mango and dates, and then just kinda blend or mix everything else in. Since the nuts were already blended (I used a mix of walnuts and cashews from Yupik, along with their hemp seeds), I just got the mangos and dates as best I could and then mixed everything up. Honestly, despite the chunkiness that may or may not have been originally intended, they were quite tasty! I’m not normally a huge ‘energy ball’ person, I find them either too mushy or too nutty or just kinda flavorless, but these were a winner for me for a couple of reasons. 1) The mango really helped add some flavor and (natural) sweetness. 2) the chunkiness of the mango and dates added some much needed variety in texture 3) the lime zest helped the color and flavor. Overall, these were super well received, even by normally picky me!

Strategy

C02: Second Chance is a fantastic and crunchy cooperative game from Vital Lacerda. Known for his heavy games, we love that this one (specifically this version, as the original was competitive), is cooperative. In it, you’re doing the typical Lacerda thing of ‘oh there’s only a couple of things you can do on a turn’, but the order of when and how you do those things is critical to making your turn successful. It’s kinda tricky teaching this game without alpha gaming it. You either end up letting people fumble along and you lose very quickly, or you tell them exactly what to do (and you still might lose 😂). Jon obviously usually goes with the former approach, and from what I could tell at my table of games, it sounds like they lost rather quickly, but then set it up and replayed, and won!

In the game, you’re trying to get knowledge, propose plans, build infrastructure, and construct the clean energy power plant (wind, solar, forest, and water) for as many continents as you can in 4 decades without getting overrun by carbon emissions. Money can be extremely tight but manageable. In some ways it’s the kind of game where you discuss the entire round and each person’s turn at the beginning of the round, then just do all that. Except for the drawing of carbon tokens at the end of the round that can range from 20-40, there is very little lucky in the game, so it all comes down to your poor or proper planning skills. It’s a nice one to pull out when you’ve got a group of heavy strategists who still want to cooperate!

Forest Shuffle is one of my favorites! We first played it on BGA, and I immediately knew I wanted to own it. It was a little hard to get a hold of at the time since it was so new, but I have a great mom who is both kind, generous, and an excellent sleuth. Shortly after playing it for the first time, we went to visit her and I gushed about it. We then went on to visit more family, and when we came back through my parents place it was there waiting for me! She had tracked down a copy at a local game store several states away and had them ship it. What a great mom! 😍

In it, you are developing your forest ecosystem by playing cards above, below, to the left, or right of your trees. On your turn you either play a card or draw two cards (either randomly or from the clearing), and painfully, the cost to play a card is, cards (discarded to the clearing). So there’s this constant angst and agony of ‘I need more cards to be able to pay for these cards’ but then you draw cards you also want to play, and you have a hand limit of 10 and you want to get certain tags to activate bonuses and play this card before the other one and ahhhhh….the struggle is real. But it’s so good and the animals are so cute! You play until the third ‘winter is coming’ card is revealed from the draw deck and then score all your points! (Which, after adding in some expansions, is quite the time-consuming task lol). The expansions are both good and bad, in that they offer more cute animals and strategies, and mitigate what some might say were overpowered strategies in the base game, but they also dilute the deck so if you’re going for a certain strategy it can be harder with the expansions mixed in. There’s also a new standalone version (Forest Shuffle Dartmoor), which I played once online. Some say it streamlines the original plus expansions into one consolidated experience and takes the best of all the things. If you don’t have anything Forest Shuffle, I’d consider 1) whether you like swampy moors or more traditional forests 2) whether you think you’d want expansions or not. But in any case, definitely get some version of it cause it’s fantastic!

Queendomino: After our two Earth Day/Arbor day games, a couple of people left and we were down to 8, which was just right for playing a giant version of Queendomino! If you mix Kingdomino with it and play in partners, it can go up to 8. This is fantastic for the group we had, where most of the people had played Kingdomino before and everyone was a solid gamer and quick to pick up on things. Those who hadn’t played Kingdomino before were assisted by their partner, and the game moves solidly and swiftly even at 8. I love that you get to build a 7×7 instead of a 5×5 like in the 2 player version of Kingdomino. For those unfamiliar with either version, in Kingdomino you are drafting tiles split into two types of terrain and building out your kingdom. At the end of the game, you multiple the number of tiles in a group of terrain by the number of crowns on it. The drafting is also fun because if you draft the ‘best’ tile, next round you draft last (and vice versa). This makes it a simple but satisfying puzzle. In Queendomino, it adds red tiles that you can put buildings on, knights that you can use to tax and get money (to buy the buildings), towers to attract the queen, and a dragon (rarely used in our games of care bear players). Everyone had a good time with this and it was a fun way to end the night. I think we’d only played the 8 player team version once before years ago, and I’d forgotten how good it is. It’ll definitely be coming out more often as a nice alternative to party games when we have 8 gamers who want to stick together.

Nature games are so fun because 1) they’re often very cute, beautiful, and aesthetically pleasing. They often have gorgeous art on the cards and/or awesome components to satisfy the shallow gamer in me. 2) they allow us to experience nature from the comfort of our homes, which is especially fantastic during late April blizzards in Alberta 🫠.

If you’re looking for more nature themed games, boy do I have you covered! Check out my full library of nature themed games {here} and find even more to add to your collection!

Want to buy these games? Check out your friendly local game store (FLGS), Amazon [here], or get a first-order discount at Board Game bliss [here].

Or buy Forest Shuffle on Amazon.com, Queendomino on Amazon.com or Amazon.ca.