Flourishing
What the Rainforest Doesn't Ask For
I got Hutan to the table this week (OK BGA), the rainforest one where you spend the whole game planting flowers and watching trees grow up out of them, and it took me two rounds to notice what the game was actually doing to me. You don't place the animals. You never really move the orangutan tile or the little rhino directly. You plant flowers, you connect them. The flowers grow into trees, and at some point, if the habitat underneath is dense enough and the right colors are touching, the animal just shows up. It arrives because the conditions were right, not because you moved it there or summoned it. The conditions were just right.
I kept catching myself reaching for the wrong kind of control. Early on I wanted to build toward the tiger, specifically, the way I'd build toward a combo in a heavier game, counting exactly what I needed and working backward from it. But Hutan doesn't really let you do that. You take what the shared market gives you that round, you fit it into your own patch of rainforest as sensibly as you can, and the animals turn up as a consequence of the forest being good, not as a reward for manipulating them. By round five I'd stopped trying to summon anything and started just tending what was in front of me, and that was when the board actually started to fill in.
There's an old idea, I that goes back to Aristotle although it shows up everywhere once you're looking for it, that flourishing isn't something you can go get directly. You can't pursue happiness the way you pursue a paycheck. It arrives, if it arrives, as a byproduct of doing other things well, tending your relationships, doing work that has some integrity to it, paying attention to what's actually in front of you instead of the outcome you've decided you want. The people who chase it head on tend to end up further from it than the people who forget to chase it at all because they were busy with something realer.
I don't want to lean on that too hard, it's a cardboard rainforest and I was mostly just trying to figure out where to put a yellow flower before my turn ran long. But there was a real moment, somewhere around that fifth round, watching a habitat I hadn't been building toward suddenly qualify, and a cassowary flip up into a spot I hadn't planned for, where the mechanic and the idea lined up cleanly enough that I noticed it, really noticed it. You do the tending. You don't get to decide what shows up. Most of the time that's the part of any system, a game or otherwise, that takes the longest to actually believe.
The trees don't know they're growing a habitat. They're just growing.
By Norman, BigGame, BGG Tabletop. Photography. Philosophy. The spaces where they all live.
