Defenders of the Wild, designed by Henry Audubon and T.L. Simons and published by Outlandish Games, is a cooperative, card-driven game that blends asymmetric player abilities with ecological resistance.
Defenders of the Wild shows its political hand early — anti-industrial, anti-colonial, and deeply rooted in the idea of rewilding — and leans into it. But it’s also a mechanically tight, visually striking and often tough experience that rewards teamwork, planning, and empathy.
Players represent characters from four woodland factions — The Order, The Council, The Coven and the Sect — each fighting to protect their habitat from an invading machine army. The map is a hexagonal grid of forests, marshes, mountains, and plains, all surrounding a central machine core. The machines are building factories, spreading pollution, and erecting walls and your job is to push back — cleaning up toxic sites, destroying infrastructure, and rewilding colonised spaces back into verdant bliss.
Each faction is led by one of two organizers, represented by beautifully crafted wooden figures and a unique deck of defender cards that includes characters from each faction. These defenders are your action economy, and each round, players secretly choose one card from their hand, then reveal simultaneously.
The chosen card determines how many actions you can take and what special abilities you’ll have. But here’s the twist: you can’t discuss your defender choices in advance. You choose these defenders in complete silence (or at least without discussing what you’ll do) and then once revealed, you can plan what to do with the cards you’ve all chosen. This creates a fascinating tension that simulates the slightly disjointed thinking between the factions and simulates the nature and inherent difficulty of managing underground resistance movements.
The factions themselves are well-defined, if in practice, purely mechanical. The Sect are aggressive technologists, able to breach walls and destroy factories with ease. The Coven are more mystical, using rituals to cleanse toxic sites and manipulate terrain. The Council and The Order make up a strong selection of middle-of-the-road characters, with healing, defensive abilities and strong but straightforward offense. Each card represents a single Defender (of the Wild) with a name and a preferred habitat matching their faction. These Defenders can be “killed” if the player takes three damage, causing a card to be removed at random from your hand.
I found the association between cards and Defenders as a living, breathing force a bit disconnected (given that the only character who appears as a physical model on the board will be your Organizer) but that’s just me. Other players around the table, especially my eldest child, felt a strong sense of connection to the characters in their deck and felt deeply wounded at the loss of a Defender. Whilst I found no detriment to my game when making decisions that might result in a death, I noticed that she in particular would make choices to avoid the same — often resulting in greater loss elsewhere. There’s a lesson there somewhere, I think.
In any case, and depending on the organizer you chose, you’ll have a specific deck made up of cards from each faction, giving each deck/Organizer a distinct rhythm. Learning how each deck operates and how the characters interlock is key to success. You’ll often find that one faction’s strength compensates for another’s weakness, and the game rewards players who lean into the roles that their chosen organizers are trying to play, rather than trying to do everything.
The game is won if all factions build their camps and rewild every factory on the board, but as with all co-operative games, there are multiple ways to lose. A loss occurs if the machines complete their core construction, if all six toxic sites are placed, or if two defenders from the same habitat are killed. These loss conditions are thematic and quite unpleasant, and they force players to stay alert and responsive.
The group is not simply building based on a static board state — it’s firefighting, adapting, and sometimes sacrificing progress in one place to prevent collapse elsewhere. The machines themselves are controlled by a deck of cards that escalate their presence each round. Some cards spawn new structures, others spread pollution, and a few trigger devastating chain reactions that can wipe out entire regions if left unchecked. On almost all turns, the machines sent out into the Wild will chug along the borders of tiles throwing out their metallic silver walls — with a feeling of ominous certainty.
One of the most compelling aspects of Defenders of the Wild is its simultaneous play structure. Because players reveal their defender cards at the same time, there’s no downtime, and the game maintains a brisk pace even at four players. This also means that coordination is tricky. You might plan to breach a wall only to find your teammate has brought a similar Defender and will act before you, or you might waste a cleansing action because someone else has a powerful effect that won’t do much else. These moments aren’t frustrating — they’re thematic. They reflect the messy reality of collective action, where intentions are aligned but execution is imperfect.
The production is excellent. The board is modular and visually distinct, with clear iconography and vibrant art. The wooden organizer tokens are a standout — tactile, thematic, and nicely screen-printed. The machine cards are varied and unpredictable, creating a sense of escalating threat without overwhelming the players, and the faction decks are well-balanced, offering meaningful choices without bogging down the flow. The rulebook is clear and well-structured, with helpful diagrams and examples that make onboarding smooth even for players new to cooperative strategy games.
Replayability in Defenders of the Wild is strong and probably necessary as you’re unlikely to succeed easily. With two organizers per faction, variable machine setups and a modular board, no two games feel quite the same. The difficulty starts tough and scales well, with experienced groups able to increase the challenge by adding more machine cards or limiting communication further. There’s also a solo mode that’s surprisingly robust, allowing one player to control multiple factions with streamlined rules and a modified threat deck.
Defenders of the Wild is a thoughtful, thematic, and mechanically satisfying cooperative game. It’s not just about saving the forest — it’s about learning to work together in silence, trusting your teammates, and embracing the necessary sacrifices and inherent challenges of posing resistance. Whether you’re breaching walls, healing habitats, or simply trying to survive one more round, this is a game that rewards care, courage, and collaboration.
Defenders of the Wild is available now from Amazon.
