The board game that connects you with wild edible greens
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The piquant wood sorrel is used in appetising chutneys and goes into salads; the sour butterfly pea flowers make nourishing tisanes; and the bitter balloon vine go into delicious rasams and chilas. These ingredients now feature in a fascinating new board game called Map the Wild.
Designed by two nature enthusiasts—Shruti Tharayil and Rahul Hasija—Map the Wild brings edible and medicinal plants to India’s homes. The two-player game requires each participant to design a challenge for their opponent, where they manoeuvre through the city’s wilderness and find medicinal and edible plant antidotes for the problems they encounter en route. From caffeine cravings and hunger pangs to allergies and toothache, get ready to find the green solution to all these obstacles in this climate-altered world.
Chennai-based Tharayil runs the popular Instagram page Forgotten Greens. It shares information about uncultivated edible and wild plants commonly found in and around cities. Through her posts and her curated Wild Food Walks, Tharayil is building awareness about urban green spaces and, as she calls them, the ‘ecological treasures that often remain hidden in plain sight’.
Jaipur’s Hasija is the founder of Swacardz, where he builds board and card games to facilitate holistic communication. Having lived a Map the Wild-like life for over a decade on a forest farm on the outskirts of Udaipur, the game designer gained first-hand knowledge of medicinal and edible plants, and realised the importance of preserving this information. Around mid-2022, the duo began thinking about how they could convert their shared knowledge into a game that would be appealing for people across ages, and the blueprint for Map the
. Read more on livemint.com
