Description

Woomal is an educational cooperative board game published internally by The Guides and Scouts of Finland as part of the 2009-2011 Finnish-Senegalese environmental project of the same name (the word means 'development' in the Wolof language of Western Africa). Although the game contains a lot of snippets of text describing basic environmental problems and solutions around Senegal, the actual game play is language independent producing simple, thematically imaginable situations which the players can use as a node of thought for discussions and learning.

During the game, players move their pawns around a highly abstracted map and use combinations of knowledge cards in three colours to remove corresponding combinations of problem markers from affected areas. Starting with just one card, players can acquire new ones by collecting enough markers from the map or by going to the education center. The three different colours represent three generic categories of issues: water, the natural environment and human activities.

Because the problems are often too complicated or become too large, players need to work together and plan their turns carefully so that their characters can work together in the game and share their knowledge and effort in the most effective way. Due to the randomly allocated problem markers giving players new objectives and blocking movement on the map, the game is constantly presenting small, changing spatial puzzles for players to solve. Separate game sessions can develop in very different ways and provide varied narratives to think about.

Players win the game by removing all the larger problems from the map or by each player collecting enough knowledge cards so that everyone is prepared for the future. The players lose if all the villages on the map are covered with problem markers or if too many larger problems accumulate anywhere on the map. Woomal could be described as a very simple version of Pandemic, played on a grid of hexagons.