Please join us via Zoom as we hear about the award-winning board game, Wingspan. Wingspan is a relaxing, yet competitive, card-driven, board game in which you are bird enthusiasts (researchers, bird watchers, ornithologists, and collectors) seeking to discover and attract the best birds to your network of wildlife preserves. Each bird extends a chain of powerful combinations in one of your habitats. Each habitat focuses on a key aspect of the growth of your preserves. 

Game designer, Elizabeth Hargrave, grew up in Florida playing games with her family.  Currently she is a health consultant in Silver Spring, MD; an amateur birder, and a former policy analyst for NORC at the University of Chicago. Hargrave's inspiration for the game came from visits to Lake Artemesia near her home in Maryland. She stated that she selected the theme because "there were too many games about castles and space, and not enough games about things I'm interested in".  During her visits to Lake Artemesia, she would create personal charts of the birds she observed there.  The special powers afforded by the birds in the game closely resemble the unique characteristics of the actual birds observed and documented by Hargrave, with statistics on their diet, habitat, status, and wingspan of birds sourced from the organizations such as Cornell Lab of Ornithology, National Audubon Society, and the IUCN’s Red List.  In 2016, Hargrave pitched the idea for Wingspan to Stonemaier Games, a company from St. Louis, MO.  The concept of the game interested Stonemaier president, Jamey Stegmaier, who saidthat "there is something about birds that instantly captures a human desire to collect, sort, and admire.”

Hargrave has also designed:  Mariposas, a game about migrating Monarchs that lets players be part of their amazing journeys; Tussie-Mussie, a game based on a Victorian fad that assigned meanings to the flowers that friends and lovers exchanged; and The Fox Experiment.