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Tiny Trees

Tiny Trees is a competitive tree building board game where the trees you grow branch into the third dimension!

Tiny Trees is a competitive tree-building game for 2-4 players where you are a nature spirit trying to become the next Demigod of Trees!

Unlike most board games that lie flat on your table, the trees you grow branch out into the third dimension! Whether you want to relax and creatively grow a tree or focus on the deep-rooted strategy to win, you'll be creating something you can be proud of from the moment you open the box. 

Developer:
The Tiny Trees Team: Michael Perce and Joanna Yu

Release Date:
Kickstarter on July 10.

Platform:
Board Game

Website:
GrowTinyTrees.com

Price:
$33 + Shipping for the Regular Version
$79 + Shipping for the Deluxe Version

Build a Tree in Three Dimensional Space
By slotting together hexagonal cards, you can grow trees out of your table! The hexagonal shape makes the overall structure look extremely natural and allows the player to grow whatever they want.

42 Hand-Illustrated Hexagonal Cards
Three unique types of bark on the cards give over 58 QUINTILLION possible combinations to grow, which is more than the number of trees ON EARTH! (Yes we did the math!)

8 Distinct Blessings
Blessings alter the rules of the game or allow spirits to take different actions under the right circumstances. With 28 unique combinations, the game is further altered every time and makes the strategy more interesting!

Competitive but Not Adversarial
Even though Tiny Trees is a competitive game, we didn't want to create an environment where players sabotaged or ruined other people's trees so the game doesn't pit players against each other! However, if you still want that type of experience, some of the blessings allow you to interfere with other players’ progress!

Fantastic No Matter Your Playstyle
Since you earn points at the end of the game, you can tailor what you earn points for if you want to focus more on the strategy or if you just want to sit back and enjoy curating your miniature tree — Tiny Trees supports it all! This also means that the game is well suited for all ages since you can still be proud of what you grew throughout the game whether you win or lose!

Click here to download our images and video as a zip!

Click here to download our logos as a zip!

This game started in September of 2017 as a solo class project of Michael's in a board game design class and was initially designed to make the players feel stressed. Originally inspired by bored Dungeons and Dragons players stacking dice, the tension they felt when they got to the last dice spawned a game where players had to stack Jenga blocks to grow “trees” of a certain height. Players enjoyed the creativity and personalization they could have while growing their trees and Michael wanted to maintain that feeling when it came to the next iteration of the game, which is when Joanna joined the team.

The team couldn’t find readily producible wooden blocks so the game underwent many changes. Michael still wanted the game to be about nature and took inspiration from growing bonsai trees. The solution then was to use hexagonal cards and slot them together to still preserve the creativity and personalization in the original. When making prototypes, Michael cut out over 200 of these hexagons and continued to iterate and improve on our prototypes.

The game has been playtested over seventy times with hundreds of people, and the design team has spent many a long night pouring over the feedback and data obtained to continue improving and iterating on the gameplay.

Michael Perce @SecretlyAPlant
Michael is the lead designer on Tiny Trees. He is an eighteen year-old freshman at the USC School for Interactive Media and Game Design. He loves to both play and design games and have been doing both for the vast majority of his life. He's heavily inspired by the steampunk genre, but is primarily inspired by nature.

Joanna Yu @Clavierao
Joanna Yu is a co-designer and lead artist on Tiny Trees. She is an eighteen-year-old student studying Interactive Media and Game Design at USC. She loves painting landscapes, drawing birds, and petting dogs. Her favorite video games include the Final Fantasy, Tales of, and Fire Emblem franchises as well as Overwatch. 

Michael Perce
Lead Developer, Event Manager, Usability Lead

Joanna Yu
Lead Artist, Social Media Manager

Send us an email at GrowTinyTrees@gmail.com to request a review copy of Tiny Trees!

You will be asked to provide credentials.

Images can be downloaded as a .zip here.