Playing Defenders of the Wild, a poem comes to mind: “Sailing to Byzantium,” William Butler Yeats’ lament of old age and concern over whether anything remains after this life. I considered recording a recitation to embed in this article, but you’d be better off hearing it from Dermot Crowley.

These creatures wouldn’t normally get along.

Maybe that sounds funny. How many board games turn one’s attention to Irish poets? Too few.

I don’t think it’s happenstance. Above the table, Defenders of the Wild is saturated with autumnal colors. Setting up the game, someone inevitably remarks that it looks like Catan, what with the hex-frame that rings the board. Yet Catan never looked so solemn. The marshes of this land are rimed with first frost. The mountains wear a shawl of cold mist. The brighter colors, those of the fields and forests, are bright only because they are the visage of nature in its hibernation-throes. The grass gone yellow. The trees bleeding color into leaves that will fall at the slightest stir. What awaits on the other side? The stillness of a winter grave? Rebirth?

Or something worse? The ceaseless tilling of unthinking ploughs. Gasoline permeating the air. Clattering, clambering robots, articulated for mobility but hideous in their movements, patrolling a landscape that will never again hear birdsong.

When Yeats writes that “Whatever is begotten, born, and dies,” I feel old. I think of the windshield after a long drive in my parents’ car, smeared orange and green. I think of my windshield two months ago after we took our own children to Denver. Clean. Unspotted. Biodiversity disappearing right before my eyes. Not in the distant rainforest, where I can cluck about how they should know better. Here, in the heartland of my own country.

The cooks are warriors, the loaves their swords.

As games about standing firm in the face of a dying world, Defenders of the Wild is timely in much the same way as Daybreak, although T.L. Simons and Henry Audubon take a different approach than the one embraced by Matto Menapace and Matt Leacock. There’s the obvious contrast: where Daybreak planted its feet in the real, casting the United States, Europe, China, and the Majority World as its protagonists, Defenders of the Wild adopts an approach redolent of Cole Wehrle’s Root, cloaking its commentary behind the veil of fable.

Both games are about cooperation. In Daybreak, it was international rivals. In Defenders of the Wild, your heroes are creatures of air and land, those that crawl and gallop, predators and prey. My favorite card is a wolf medic. He’s emblematic of the game at large. Grinning wildly, his bone-saw perched across one shoulder like a greatsword, he’s having the time of his life. When the revolution is finished, he’ll be the one amputationist to emerge nourished rather than shell-shocked.

This emphasis on individuals also marks a greater departure from Daybreak. Where that game focused on nations and institutions and inventions, a grand project of global cooperation, Defenders of the Wild is about the small folk. This comes across in the way cards are played. In Daybreak, cards were instruments of corporations and governments, and piled together until they produced unstoppable momentum. Here, every card is a single person. Playing it means that person will take one or two actions, putting themselves at risk. An ox reshoulders his yoke to pull supplies through the woods. A bluejay guides those who once hunted her along hidden paths. A badger brews her precious herbs for the good of all. A fox takes up the banner and grows into a leader.

Daybreak is about change coming from the top. Defenders of the Wild is about change forcing its way up from beneath the soil.

Imagine a robot stamping on a pig — for ever.

It’s appropriate that a game about trashing the system — in some readings of its fable, a system that encourages so-called artificial intelligences to slurp up our fresh water and drain our power grids — should happen to feature such a robust automated rival. Your enemy here is a literal machine, a stand-in for every corporation or government that prioritized growth over health.

Simons and Audubon’s rival may be soulless, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t engineered for self-preservation. Its operations are dead simple, but each one marks the landscape in new ways. Towering engines zipper across forests and marshes in their effort to enclose and pave the wilderness. Factories pour effluent into the rivers, gradually burning toxic scars into the soil. Mechanized police, incapable of recognizing that they will soon be rendered obsolete by the very entity they champion, clatter across hilltops to harry the innocent.

Squint and the machine looks uncomfortably like the activities we’ve undertaken in a hundred board games. Those walls are Catan’s roads. Those mechs are the armies we sent to suppress dissenters and barbarians. Those factories are the cities and mines and sawmills we inflicted on empty tracts of wilderness. Listen to me. “Empty.” They were never empty. There was never such a thing as terra incognita. Only the places and people we decided didn’t count as important enough to deserve protection.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a board game counteract its own received traditions. Only last month, John du Bois delivered Striking Flint, a game that inverted the worker placement genre by having your workers sit down to prevent labor rather than enacting it. Defenders of the Wild does something similar. Like Spirit Island, but even more concrete. You are the robber pawn of Catan. You are the barbarians in every civilization game. You are the people lost in the creases of the maps drawn by empires.

And you’re not going to take it anymore.

Casualties are hard-felt.

Maybe it’s a surprise that this is such a simple game. For the most part, your actions are straightforward. Attacking a mech removes it from the map. Cleaning up pollution does the same. Breaching a wall puts a little blast marker next to it, signaling that you can now pass through the opening. (Not to mention that like everything else in this game it’s adorable.) The toughest action in terms of prerequisites is founding a camp. This requires your furries to have gained enough support through the aforementioned actions. The hardest action, rules-wise, is movement, as it’s possible for your creatures to move along habitat corridors. Until the machines stamp a wall across them, that is.

Along the way, Simons and Audubon are clear-eyed about the risks of activism and revolution. Every action is forcibly modified when enemies are near, whether hunters in your space or snipers in a nearby factory. Even the most basic and harmless activity, picking up litter, can result in a bullet hole if the resultant damage die doesn’t roll your way. Absorb too many hits and a card is claimed from your hand as a casualty, bringing the cause one step closer to fatal demoralization.

It’s a sobering note even in a fable, calling to mind the Woodland Alliance’s uprisings in Root, which were vicious and indiscriminate enough that they were only partially softened by the setting. The fable here is more focused — some might call it one-sided — with its emphasis on mutual aid, direct action, and the perils of putting oneself on the line. Some will complain that the machines are too impersonal, that they’re given less of a voice than Root’s villains… but they’re also reducing the woodland to asphalt one parcel at a time. Make of that what you will.

Regardless, Defenders of the Wild is uncompromising as a call to action. Despite the included difficulty options, failure is possible when somebody putters around the edges of the map rather than diving into the thick of it. It’s all so very human. Even when the alternative is annihilation, many of us would rather not think about the wood chipper rolling across the meadow. But it’s coming. We can feel the rumble in the earth.

Getting lucky with those walls!

Perhaps, though, it isn’t too late to alter that course. In one last essential parallel to Daybreak, there’s a stubborn streak of optimism running through this game. The walls can be blasted open. The machines can be rusted from within. The factory parks can be turned over again to nature. They will be forever changed, but may become new again. The fable teaches us that the dragon can be slain. As Yeats put it when his poem turned from despair to hope, “Once out of nature I shall never take / my bodily form from any natural thing, / but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make / of hammered gold and gold enameling.”

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A complimentary copy was provided.