W a y m a r k s ~: Flowers & Fantasy - 'Plant Hunting' As Colonial Era Board Game

Whose turn is it?

I’m not an avid board game player, but some of my friends are, and so I have often been corralled into playing with them. A friend of mine even invented a board game which was based on our group of friends and the archaeological excavation we used to spend our summers working on. It was ingenious and the playing of it even managed to reveal real-life gossip and secrets which some of the players had been unaware of previously, so whenever we played, it was always immensely good fun – although sometimes game-play could go on for hours and hours!

When I was a child, I remember seeing a board game advertised on TV, which I must have nagged my parents to get me for Christmas one year. It was called Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs (Waddingtons, 1985). It was a kind of Indiana Jones meets The Lost World, or The Land That Time Forgot themed game (NB – it came out well before the first Jurassic Park movie) in which players had to cross a valley to reach an Aztec temple and retrieve a treasure of gold coins, but there were a number of obstacles which could stop you. As I recall these were primarily either falling into a swamp and going round in circles until somehow you were able to get out; that is, if you didn’t get eaten by a swamp monster. Similarly, you might get eaten by marauding dinosaurs or a pterodactyl swooping down while you tried to cross the board. The routes across which might also become cut-off if a volcano erupted and lava subsequently began to spread across the board. It was really good fun, and I played it many times over the years with both family and friends.

The theme of the game being exploration evidently belied the childhood interests which in later life would lead me on to researching and writing a PhD dissertation about early twentieth-century explorers in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. Indeed, Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs has some echoes of the search for fossilised dinosaur eggs in 1920s China. A genuine fossil hunt in which the fedora hat-wearing Roy Chapman Andrews is often touted as the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones himself. But it was the so-called ‘plant hunters’ who perhaps have interested me the most alongside the possibly better-known archaeologists and anthropologists. As regular readers of this blog will know – ‘plant hunters’, such as Frank Kingdon-Ward, George Forrest and Joseph Rock, Reginald Farrer and Bill Purdom, as well as Frank Ludlow and George Sherriff, have all been featured in various blog posts here on Waymarks. And I am always on the look out for new information about all of them, but one thing I wasn’t expecting to appear was a board game loosely based on their wider botanical cohort's endeavours. Botany – A Victorian Expedition … A Game Full of Adventure, Intrigue and Flowers (Dux Somnium, 2023).

The promotional blurb for this particular board game, which doesn’t appear to have been released yet, seems to imply it is based on the plant hunters of an earlier era – perhaps more along the lines of ‘eminent’ Victorians, such as: Robert Fortune, Richard Spruce, Walter Henry Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Charles Darwin – perhaps with some ‘indomitable’ women explorers, of the likes of Isabella Bird, Amelia Edwards, Mary Kingsley, Nina Mazuchelli, or Lizzie Hessel, added in for good measure. What strikes me the most though is the tone of its promotional blurb which seems weirdly out of joint with our current times. It reads like a ringing endorsement of colonialism. Almost as though it were an entertaining-yet-educational tool for instilling a colonialist ethos in the impressionable minds of a rising generation of young board game players and would-be empire builders!

“Adventure, intrigue, and flowers! Botany is a strategy board game where you take on the role of a Victorian Era flower hunter as you explore the world to gather fortune and fame and be named the Royal Botanist. In Botany, each player takes on the role of a character whose abilities will shape the way they play the game. Will you focus on exploring the globe in search of the most valuable specimens? Will you make quick and efficient trips to gather reputation quickly and build your estate?

Each player begins the game with a set of randomized goals that they then use to plot their path to victory. When players set out from their estate, they have access only to the coins they can carry with them. They can use these coins to traverse the globe and gain crew members and items to improve their odds of surviving the unknown, enhance their abilities, and increase the efficiency with which they traverse the map. However, there is danger in spending too freely, and players must ensure they have enough wealth on hand to return to England with their specimens intact.

Turns in Botany are streamlined in order to minimize downtime and keep players engaged. Players will move around the map, build their character, and experience the story of their rise to fame, all with an eye for efficiency. Points are gained by improving the quality of your garden, retrieving live specimens from around the globe, and adding preserved flowers to your botanical press. The specimens that players hunt, the goals they focus on to achieve victory, and the events they experience create a unique feel across each game.” – [description from publisher; see here]

The board game’s website seems to be using a nostalgia for empire, particularly in the form of its aesthetics, quaintly emphasising ‘Beautiful Victorian Artwork – Historical illustrations and photography immerse the player in the world of Victoran [sic] plant hunters. Enjoy learning about the flowers of the world with this incredible art.’ As well as, ‘Unique Characters and Entertaining Events – Botany’s characters and events paint a story as you traverse the globe to become the ultimate flower hunter.’ This appears to be a kind of “fighting fantasy” version of colonial capitalism in the form of a board game. Monopoly (Parker Brothers, 1935) for die-hard, flower-fancying imperialists, perhaps? – From an academic point-of-view, I am thoroughly intrigued. We are all highly accustomed to seeing the tropes of imperialism and a colonial worldview consistently perpetuated in TV dramas and Hollywood films. Such themes are invariably tweaked a little to fit our times, or as a sop to our current sensibilities. It is often highly debateable (and much debated) as to whether or not these tweaks either veil or highlight the iniquities of the past, or virtue signal by equivalence the (hopefully) more enlightened attitudes of our present age. How does such a newly invented board game fit into this present era of decolonisation, ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, versus the rise of populist nationalism and other politically conservative agendas, such as a nostalgia for empire? ... Consequently, I’d be fascinated to know more about this new board game – particularly how it was first conceived and how it came about; what source material was used to create it; and what it is actually like to play it.

I may well have to call up my old board-game-loving digging pals and see if they’d like to assist me with some further research.

In the meantime – for anyone who might be reading this who is also intrigued by the questions raised above and would like to know more about the actual history of ‘plant hunting’, economic botany, science and empire – I very much recommend the following books and websites as good places in which to start:

Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979)

Fa-Ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004)

E.H.M. Cox, Plant Hunting in China: A History of Botanical Exploration in China and the Tibetan Marches (London: Collins, 1945)

The Economic Botany Collection at Kew Gardens

The Mobile Museum Project

How Victorian Plant Hunters Shaped British Gardens