Rewilder:
A 4R Eco-Strategy

Overview

Rewilder is a 4R eco-strategy game: Recruit, Restore, Revive, and Rewild– with the aid of magical creatures.

Think of it as a reverse of a 4X game:  Instead of exploring, expanding, exploiting, and exterminating, you restore and rewild the wilderness with the aid of authentic magical creatures out of legend and fairytales.

Inspiration

A few years ago, I had purchased some plots of land from a site called Highland Titles who have a very interesting mission and approach:  They are the stewards of a conservation area in Scotland that they are working to rewild an area that had been exploited by industry in the past.  They sell microplots to raise money to plant trees, and hopefully be able to entice wildlife to return.

I often dreamed of visiting my (small) plots and encountering some of the Fair Folk of legend said to inhabit Scotland.  I wondered what if they were real?  Could we work together to restore the wildlands around the world with ecology and magic?

Game Design

Pillars

1. Myth Meets Ecology

A magical fusion of mythology and environmental science, where magical and supernatural creatures help restore ecosystems or turn them into dangerous, haunted wilds. 

2. Multiple Paths to Rewilding

Players can restore the land through beauty, balance, or fear. Whether using unicorns and dryads or wyrms and banshees, the strategy is theirs. Each path teaches different lessons and offers different benefits.

3. Strategic, Emergent Gameplay

Creatures have either synergy or dissonance with other creatures, which affects the unfolding ecosystem and its resistance to threats. The strategy is layered, replayable, and evolves over time with biome complexity and interactions.

4. Your Environment Reflects Your Decisions

Which creatures the player chooses to attract and how they decide to defend the wilderness—visibly alters the land. Will they create a serene haven of magical beauty, or a dark forest of nightmares? The visual and ecological feedback loop reinforces that you shape the world.

Values

1. Conservation Through Play

Learn about ecosystems and environmental restoration, biodiversity, and interdependence through meaningful gameplay.

2. Authentic Mythology and Folklore

The game features real creatures drawn from the folklore and mythology of actual cultures around the world—accurate to their stories, traits, and cultural significance. 

This honors the legends and introduces players to mythologies they may have never encountered before.

3. Player Autonomy

There is no single “correct” way to rewild. Whether through harmony, fear, chaos, or patience, the land responds to your methods—restoration is personal, strategic, and expressive.

4. Non-Violent Defense Through Magic, Mischief, and Beauty

There is no traditional combat. Instead, threats to the land are repelled through fear, illusion, enchantment, and wonder. 

Some creatures haunt intruders, while others make the land so breathtaking and alive that people choose to protect it. Beauty can be its own form of resistance.

5. Cooperation, Partnership, and Respect over Dominance and Servitude

In Rewilder, you “attract” creatures, vs. “summoning” them.  They are aiding you voluntarily, in partnership-- not through coercion or submission.