Legendary Tea Farmer — The Tea Board Game
This is Badass Bidjo - a legendary tea farmer and a renegade at heart. Stories of his excellent tea-making travel around, but he follows his own rules and doesn’t care about fame. He is passionate about nature and his plantations. He works hard each day to make the best tea for his customers and to give back to the community around him.
We, the creators of this game, are Renegade Tea Farmers, growing tea on our organic farm in Georgia and Badass Bidjo is our imaginary role model. In addition to growing and producing tea, we also love board games and with this game, we want to give you the possibility to try to be a tea farmer too!
Legendary Tea Farmer is a game for 2 to 5 players who each represent a different tea estate. To run a successful tea business, farmers firstly have to rehabilitate abandoned tea gardens, then grow and produce good quality tea, find a market to sell it to and also give back to the local community. As you are newbies in the tea world, then Badass Bidjo is there to mentor you. While each farmer can produce tea, only the one who manages to hire Badass Bidjo, will produce tea with good enough quality to earn a reputation on the tea market and become a legendary tea farmer. Badass Bidjo is a busy man though and he mentors only one farmer per season...
Do you have what it takes to be the next Legendary Tea Farmer? With all the twists and turns that life throws at you and competition breathing on your neck, can you make tea that people would love and at the same time run an economically viable farm? Be it a cow eating your harvest, bad weather conditions affecting the harvest or an unexpected free day due to a wedding in the village, you need to find a way to adapt and come out of it as the best tea farmer in the region.
Legendary Tea Farmer is a strategic game where the randomness of a dice roll brings in more fun! It's a game to play with the whole family, it needs some strategic planning, but in general, is easy enough to be enjoyed by also those who don't necessarily love strategy games so much. The game is on average around 80 minutes long (depending on the number of players), so short enough to take a revanche on the same night.
The rulebook will come in English, German and Estonian. If we have enough followers from some other country, then in that language as well.
See our page for more details about our crowdfunding campaign and help us bring Bidjo to life!
RENEGADE TEA ESTATE
There are countries with rich tea-growing histories, and others that are just starting to explore growing Camellia sinensis in brave new ways. But what about the regions where tea was once an important part of life, but has long since been forgotten? Sitting between Europe and Asia, under the Great Caucasus Mountains, Georgia is a place going through a period of tea revival. Renegade Tea Estate is a small group of enthusiasts rediscovering and giving new life to the abandoned tea fields of Soviet times.
What is Georgian tea?
The history of Georgian tea dates back to 1845 when the first tea bushes were planted in western Georgia, which at that time was a part of the Russian Empire. The Empire took a scientific approach and sent out researchers to China to study and source tea plants. Georgian tea was first introduced to the world thanks to the help of a Chinese tea grower, Lao Jin Jao, who was invited to Georgia to help develop the industry. Seven years later, in 1900, his tea won the gold medal at the Paris World Expo.
At the peak of the industry, in 1985, ca 70,000 hectares of land was used for tea plantations. Only decades ago, 150,000 tonnes of tea was produced in Georgia, compared to the 2,000-3,000 tonnes made today. Georgia provided for 95% of the entire Soviet Union’s tea consumption. Huge factories were built, with entire villages alongside, employing whole communities. Men in the villages still tell stories about how one could buy a new car with the salary earned during one season. You could see and smell tea whenever you went out of the house. It was a time of glory with an abundance of jobs and a lot of development. The heyday abruptly ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The industry was decimated in only five short years.
Renegade Tea Estate started as a dream to do something different — to break free from the bureaucratic chains of the corporate world. We wanted to do something close to nature that would bring joy to us and our customers — something that would matter. We ended up in Georgia quite by chance. We found our calling when we learned about how the once glorious tea industry collapsed, leaving behind hundreds of abandoned plantations. This had a deep impact on us and we wanted to play our part in putting Georgian tea back on the map.
You can learn more about Renegade Tea Estate in Eighty Degrees issue 05.
Farmers behind this game
We, Hannes and Kristiina, are tea farmers in Georgia who love to play board games with our family. One winter we started to think that it would be cool to have a tea farm board game and not finding one we could get our hands on in Estonia, we decided to create our own. So, together with Hannes' son Marten, we started to craft the idea of a tea plantation board game. When creating this game, we made it the way we like games ourselves - enough strategic planning, but not too serious or too long, so it would be fun to play together with children as well. Our own journey as farmers has had many ups and downs and we tried to incorporate those adventures, surprises, failures and successes into this game, so you would also get a glimpse of the life of a real tea farmer.