While playing this won’t actually score you any brownie points with Mother Nature (though at least only recycled materials are used in its manufacture), it’s nice to see a game that takes a more organic approach to its mechanics.

Instead of houses or ships, your tokens take the form of trees you can nurture from seedling to forest giants.

Like Catan and a few hundred other board games, the objective is to dominate the board and gain control of the maximum amount of resources.

There’s only one of these to worry about, namely sunlight. Don’t mistake simplicity for tedium, though: since the “sun” rotates around the board to represent the changing of the seasons, your strategy will be influenced by both time and space.

Anyone over the age of about 12 should find the rules (which you can check out here)easy enough to understand – pretty much everything you need to know is explained on the board itself.

Younger children may find the game’s pace to be a little slow, though. Each game takes about an hour from start to finish.

This is certainly an educational game: apart from the ecological theme, this board game (as well as titles like COGZ) has received a nod of approval from MENSA.

That, in fact, is only one of a whole laundry list of accolades Photosynthesis has won all across the globe.