Backyard Butterfly 2025

An educational life science board game for kids and their families. Find and raise monarchs and learn about their life cycle. Backyard Butterfly is a game played in 4 stages:

Stage 1: Hunt for eggs. Roll the leaf shaped die and flip over 1-3 leaf tiles until you find an egg. Place an 'egg tile' on your milkweed board. Move on to stage 2 on your next turn. Stage 2: Feed your hungry caterpillar. Action sequence:

Roll leaf die to populate leaf tiles onto your milkweed board. Roll both caterpillar dice. Move your caterpillar meeple around the milkweed board twice with the goal of landing on leaf tiles to eat. Place any eaten leaves onto your leaf tracker board.

Continue with this stage until your leaf tracker board is full. Stage 3: Chrysalis Coin. Flip the coin (twice per turn). Green side- continue to wait. Orange and Black side- your monarch butterfly is ready to emerge! Move on to stage 4! Stage 4: Your monarch has emerged and flys away! Place a monarch butterfly token in the sky above the leaf tracker board. Butterfly tokens represent points earned. Begin your next turn back at the egg stage.

There are two additional gameplay variations: 'BB Helper' walks parents through how to teach even the youngest gamers to play a game with multiple actions and stages in a way that is intuitive and fun. 'Field of Milkweed' is a competitive version of the base game where all 4 milkweed boards are placed together to form a field. All resources are up for grabs and nature can strike at any time. Nature being an additional d12 rolled at the beginning of the caterpillar stage causing havoc.