Renegade Tea Estate – based in the country of Georgia in Eastern Europe – recently finished its fifth production season, and now the estate is waiting for its teas to reach its warehouse in Estonia. However, the estate’s tea farmers have been working on something a bit different from their usual tea farming and production. They’ve been developing a tea farm board game.
In addition to growing tea, the seven owners at Renegade Tea Estate love board games (you can read a profile about the tea estate at World Tea News here). Thus, last winter, they got the idea to develop their own game with a spin on growing tea. Now, they’ve launched a crowdfunding campaign at Gamefound, to support the eventual production of the game.
The game is called Legendary Tea Farmer.
(Photo: Courtesy of Renegade Tea Estate)
Kristiina Mehik, one of the partners at Renegade Tea Estate, told World Tea News: “The idea actually started from the family of two of our founders, Hannes and Kristiina. They have been playing board games quite a lot with their family, and last winter they were looking for a tea-related game, but not finding something they could get their hands on in Estonia, they decided to create their own. At first, it was just a project for themselves, but as it turned out as a really fun game, then we decided to bring it to the public under Renegade Tea Estate.”
The game’s crowdfunding campaign launched on Nov. 1 and runs through Nov. 30. The intent of the campaign is to be able to produce the game and bring it to the public. However, if the game proves to be successful, the partners at Renegade Tea Estate may distribute it on a wider scale. Mehik noted, “…we hope there will be new people who will discover our teas via this game.”
Is it an unusual move for a tea estate to launch a board game?
Mehik said it might be “…but Renegade Tea Estate has never been a very usual tea estate either. We like to experiment and explore roads that are less known. So, in our eyes, a tea farming board game fits very well.”
The Legendary Tea Farmer board game is for two to five players, who each represent a different tea estate. “To run a successful tea business, ‘farmers’ first 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,” explained Mehik, on how the board game works. “As you are newbies in the tea world, ‘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 enough good quality to earn a reputation on the tea market and become a legendary tea farmer.”
Mehik shared that the Renegade Tea Estate journey, as tea farmers, has had its ups and downs, so they tried to put some of their adventures, surprises, failures and successes into this game, so everyone can discover what the life of a tea farmer is like. “Be it a cow eating your tea bushes, 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,” she said.
(Photo: Courtesy of Renegade Tea Estate)
Overall, Legendary Tea Farmer is a strategic game, where the randomness of a dice roll brings more fun, and it may be the only board game developed by a tea estate. “We haven’t found any other games that would be created by actual tea estates or farmers,” said Mehik.
In terms of other innovative or out-of-the-box ideas or products in the works, besides the board game, Mehik said: “We are constantly evolving and trying to find new and interesting things to offer our customers.” For example, this spring, Renegade Tea Estate stopped selling single packages of teas in its e-shop and instead began offering customers the opportunity to adopt a tea garden and pre-order their teas before the harvesting season.
“This decision was made because we wanted to distance ourselves from handling a regular e-shop and focus more on actually growing and producing teas for our community,” Mehik said. “We also wanted to reduce waste – pre-ordered teas come in bigger packages and are sent only once a year – and make it easier for the customers and ourselves as well. This way the customers don’t need to think about re-ordering every month, but can do it all at once and at the same time, we get to plan our harvesting and production better.”
For their next tea season, Renegade Tea Estate will start offering honey from its own beehives. “We have had five hives in one of our plantations as a test for a couple of seasons now, and we will be adding 20 additional bee families to bring our honey production also to a wider audience,” noted Mehik. “And there are always some more ideas in the back of our heads.”
To learn more about the Legendary Tea Farmer board game and its crowdfunding effort, visit the campaign page at Gamefound. To learn more about Renegade Tea Estate, visit RenegadeTea.com.
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