Elizabeth Hargrave’s Wingspan is the most decorated new board game of the last five years, maybe of the last twenty, winning the Kennerspiel des Jahres (making Hargrave the only woman to do so as a solo designer) honor in 2019, taking home seven different awards in Boardgamegeek’s annual honors, and earning the only perfect score of 10 I’ve given a game since I started reviewing for Paste in 2014. I was among many gamers excited for her follow-up, Mariposas, which came out this summer from AEG, but while it has the same evident love of its subject (monarch butterflies) as its predecessor (birds), it doesn’t have the same magic, and the game play falls a bit flat.
Mariposas simulates three seasons and up to five generations in the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, asking players to move their own butterfly tokens up the map from Michoacán into the U.S. and Canada, collecting flower tokens, visiting waystations, and breeding new butterflies when next to milkweed, eventually getting to fourth-generation butterflies that will return to Michoacán by game-end for points. Each season also has two or three objectives, mostly based around the locations of butterfly tokens at the end of that season, that players can achieve for smaller point gains.
Players have two movement cards in their hands at all times, and on a turn will play one and move one or more of their butterfly tokens according to the cards. You start the game with just one first-generation butterfly, and may move it several times from one card, since you can’t spread the movement actions across several tokens. Whenever your token ends an action on a hex space with a flower showing, you get one matching flower token (or two, if you hit one of those spaces up at the top of the board). When you have three of a kind, or just any four flower tokens, you can move your first-gen butterfly next to a milkweed icon and spawn a second-generation one. First-generation butterflies die off at the end of spring, and second-gen ones die at the end of summer, but each generation has more possible tokens than the last, so you will have more tokens as the game progresses. Your primary goal is to breed several fourth-generation butterflies that will return to Michoacán at game-end – you can also breed from a fourth-gen token, flipping it over so it counts as two butterflies for scoring – for the largest point gains available anywhere in the game.
There’s no interaction between players in Mariposas; you’re essentially all playing solitaire, on the same board, with the movement cards the only real difference between players. The one bit of in-game competition comes from the sixteen waystations, which all have face-down tokens at the start of the game. When any player’s butterfly first visits a waystation, they flip the token over and take the reward shown. Twelve show life cycle cards, four stages in each of three colors; three show additional waystation bonus cards with extra movement actions; the last shows a wild flower icon, allowing the player to take a flower token of their choice. If you collect all four life cycle cards of one color, you get an additional bonus, the most valuable of which seems to be the one that lets you score an additional butterfly in Michoacán at game end. The first player to reach a waystation also gets to roll a die for a free flower token, but every player after them to visit that station gets the reward shown on the token anyway.
There are two major problems with Mariposas’ play. One derives from the setup, where 16 waystation tokens are randomly distributed and placed face down at the start of the game, so a strategy that involves collecting the four matching tiles of any of the three colors is fruitless. You could spend all game searching for the fourth tile, only to find it on one of the most distant waystations (Winnipeg or Quebec City, probably), and most of the the rewards don’t justify the effort. You could just reveal all of those tokens at the start of the game, and remove the flower token bonus for the first player to get to each, or just use some other method to keep track of which waystations have already had visitors, to alleviate this issue.
The second problem is more fundamental, and I think results from Hargrave’s devotion to accuracy within her games. With just three seasons to move around the board, you have to strike a very specific balance between moving your butterflies up the board into the northern U.S. and Canada to gather rewards and score the seasonal bonuses, and the need to get your fourth-generation butterflies back to Michoacán by the end of the game so they can score. You don’t get that many movement points per season – a maximum of 30 points in fall, which you would distribute over all of your butterflies – and you have little control over what movement cards you draw. This might be very realistic, but it doesn’t do much for game play, because as soon as fall starts you’re left calculating how many movement points it’ll take to get your 4th-gen butterflies home, and you may not be able to do anything else for the season.
The game looks great, and the rulebook is easy to follow while also featuring quirky or interesting facts about monarchs, who are threatened by climate change and environmental degradation, yet are also essential pollinators on which our global food supply depends. Two of the five flowers on flower tokens look similar, but at least it’s a function of Hargrave’s commitment to authenticity. It’s just not that compelling a game – perfectly fine, but lacking the brilliant mechanics and deeper strategy that made Wingspan an all-time great.