okay I've made my introduction post, thanks for everything, here's hoping the best for the community there
Hi I'm a Game Designer (tabletop and videogames) and if the ownership of the board games community is up for grabs, I'm cool with keeping watch over it. One of my favorite games is Wingspan which isn't solarpunk but definitely is ecological and educational.
I'm thinking a good way to invigorate the community is to encourage discussions on board game design as well that way people in the solar punk community can support making environment and ecology themed game projects together. I can leverage my experience in this way.
But the main question is if most people end up using the community for general boardgames discussion is that considered alright? Most board games aren't solarpunk oriented and many of them might even have anti-ecological themes (ex. most natural resource management games, think Settlers of Catan).
This reminds me about how network traffic worked in a book called "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson (author of Cryptonomicon, and Snow Crash). In the book they described every device or application being a node and packets were routed through random nodes until they were pieced back together at their destination. That there was no central routing in these cases. It was a plot point because it's noted how difficult it is to track messages in this kind of networking. I'm not sure I'm remembering it correctly but it's a neat idea.
A lot of the classic table games, the ones that have survived through the centuries, are often quite durable and adaptive to play. Think Checkers, Chess, Go/Weiqi, backgammon, Pachisi, gungi (๐), etc. Often time pieces for these games can be improvised or fashioned from nearby materials. Boards are often simple to draw on the ground or build. This also means that these games often have very compact and durable portable boards.
Plastic waterproof standard cards are actually something I always carry around with me, as are a few packs of standard dice. You can do a lot with those two. I use them to play Poker, or President, or certain tabletop roleplaying games. A really good portable card game I've found that's surprisingly fun was called Don't L.L.A.M.A. which is a lot like Uno with more strategy and interesting decisions. It's accessible and it fits into a small box.
I'm not sure I'm exactly answering the question, but these are what come to mind when I think about games that can survive and be played during natural disasters, when far from civilization or amenities, etc
I would personally also love to know more about people's portable travel games. I hear Bananagrams is a good one. And Sushi Go was mentioned and I play that on the go too.