Project Statement

Stewards of Pyrran is a cooperative board game that reimagines fire as an essential force rather than a destructive threat. Set in California’s fire-suppressed Sierra Nevada, the game invites players to rehabilitate fire-adapted landscapes by removing infrastructure, recovering species, and practicing fire stewardship. Designed for use in outdoor education programs serving 4th–7th graders, it offers a playful, place-based introduction to fire ecology. The game will be piloted at one school, refined through feedback, and scaled across a statewide network – with long-term plans for regional adaptations that reflect local ecosystems to expand fire literacy beyond California.

Project Narrative

Background

For hundreds of millions of years, fire has shaped Earth’s ecosystems, driving evolutionary adaptations and playing a central role in maintaining biodiversity. Long before humans appeared, plants and animals evolved to tolerate – and in many cases, depend on – periodic fire. However, modern fire suppression policies have disrupted these cycles. In many fire-prone and fire-adapted landscapes, the absence of regular burning has dramatically altered ecosystems, reduced biodiversity, and increased the risk of catastrophic wildfires.

Proactive strategies like prescribed and cultural burning are increasingly recognized as critical tools for reducing wildfire risk and supporting healthy ecosystems – but broader adoption remains limited in part due to public misunderstandings about fire.

Audience

Overcoming this barrier will require reaching not only land managers, policymakers, and community leaders, but also the next generation. Youth involvement is especially important – yet most school-based exposure to fire ecology is limited, and students often encounter wildfire only through fear-based prevention messaging.

Recognizing this gap, Stewards of Pyrran was created as an accessible, place-based entry point into the complex topic of fire stewardship. Set in California’s Sierra Nevada, the game invites young people to explore fire’s ecological role through immersive, hands-on play. At its core, Stewards of Pyrran aims to shift perceptions – moving beyond fire as a threat to fire as a form of renewal.

Strategy

Stewards of Pyrran flips the script on classic board games. Instead of extracting and building, players collaborate to rehabilitate California’s fire-suppressed Sierra Nevada by removing roads and buildings, recovering species, and reconnecting fire-adapted ecosystems.

On each turn, players choose to remove infrastructure or collect from 92 unique fire-adapted plants. Plant sets can be traded for Restoration cards:

Prescribed Burner – move Fire, collect benefits, and work toward the Burn Boss award. Species Recovery – protect animals and earn the Species Sanctuary award. Resilience – gain strategic boosts like research or conservation grazing.

Fire activates on a roll of 7 – helpful or harmful depending on your hand. Rolling a 2 triggers Crisis cards with climate challenges like drought or heat wave.

The game ends when an ecological corridor has been formed. Players tally points, but the real win is shared: a thriving, fire-adapted landscape.

Impact

By leveraging familiar game mechanics, Stewards of Pyrran lowers barriers to engagement and makes complex ecological ideas accessible to young players. The game is especially well-suited for California’s sixteen outdoor education schools, all located in fire-prone landscapes and serving 4th–7th grade public school students through immersive, place-based programs.

Developed after multiple rounds of playtesting among undergraduate students, we plan to pilot the game at one outdoor education school, refine it through student and educator feedback, and then disseminate it across the broader network.

The long-term vision is to create regional expansions tailored to other fire-prone areas by swapping in locally relevant species and ecological zones. This modular approach will allow Stewards of Pyrran to evolve into a flexible, place-based learning tool for communities across the U.S. and beyond.