Hover Hummingbird Board Game on Kickstarter – When Tiny Birds Become Tactical Rivals
- Sarah
- Jun 3
- 11 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Campaign Overview
Hover hummingbird board game on Kickstarter transforms the surprising real-world behavior of hummingbirds into a fast, highly interactive tabletop strategy game built around territorial conflict, nectar management, nest building, bluffing, and courtship. Inspired by actual hummingbird ecology, the game challenges players to outmaneuver rivals in a world where beauty and brutality coexist.
Platform: Kickstarter
Category: Board Game / Strategy Game
Funding Status: $274,630 pledged of $10,000 goal
Backers: 3,543
Days Remaining: 15
Creator: IBIST / Ibis Tea
Rather than presenting hummingbirds as purely delicate garden visitors, Hover leans into their fiercely territorial instincts, asymmetric species traits, and constant struggle for resources. The project combines research-driven mechanics, hand-drawn artwork, and strong thematic immersion into a competitive experience designed to be approachable for newcomers while still rewarding tactical play.
To learn more about the unusual journey from backyard bird battles to tabletop strategy design, we spoke with the founders behind Hover hummingbird board game on Kickstarter about animal behavior, asymmetric gameplay, artistic direction, and building a nature-inspired board game for both hobby gamers and wildlife enthusiasts.
From Beautiful Birds to Brutal Competition
Hover hummingbird board game on Kickstarter takes inspiration from real hummingbird behavior, revealing them as surprisingly aggressive and territorial creatures. What first inspired you to transform these tiny birds into the centerpiece of a highly competitive strategy game?
My apartment complex which has a lot of hummingbird feeders and a lot of hummingbird battles every day. One day, as my wife and I was walking around our neighborhood two hummingbirds almost flew into us at 35mph while chasing each other in a full-fledge aerial battle. I immediately thought, "that's awesome. That would be a fun game".
I already knew that hummingbirds were naturally and hilariously aggressive (some species even have serrated beaks for that purpose) from a video made by one of my favorite Youtubers, ZeFrank, so I figured I could lean into that.
I went home and sketched a concept for a board with some base gameplay. After testing a few rounds by myself and then with my wife, it was clear the concept had legs. So I dived into more hummingbird research, bought a few books about hummingbirds and read about several hummingbird species behavior through resources from Audubon and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I incorporated more of what I learned in that research (like stealing nest materials) to develop the game's first basis.
Once we had a base game established, we invited some of our friends over to play a few rounds of the initial concept to double check if my intuition was right. They had a blast, so I started developing the game further.
Designing Around Real Animal Behavior
The game blends nectar gathering, territorial conflict, nest building, and courtship mechanics rooted in real hummingbird habits. How did you balance biological authenticity with creating gameplay that feels strategic, interactive, and fun at the table?
After researching hummingbirds, I realized much of the gameplay could be both biologically authentic and strategically engaging. I didn't want this game to just be a "take that" bonanza; that's not really how hummingbirds fight. Their actions involve a significant risk/reward calculation. Fighting means expending a LOT of energy to get a good feeding spot. If a hummingbird spends too much energy but doesn't win, it could end up in a worse position. Often, there is sizing up and showboating to see if another hummer is worth fighting. This involves flashing their gorget (the shiny, colorful cheek area) and showing off their beauty. And some hummingbirds purposely choose to avoid fights and specialize in other tactics/strategies to survive and thrive. I wanted the game to reflect these facts. You needed to be strategic and tactical in your fighting and strategy. You also need to be able to size up your opponent or even bait them into attacking you as a tactic. And you should be able to gauge, to some extent, the strength of another hummingbird through their beauty.
Originally, the game was going to be a king of the hill type of game. Fight for feeder and hold it for the longest. But within 1-2 test plays, we could tell that this was a winning snowball effect. Winners keep winning. And if you lose in the beginning, you stay at the bottom. This is how a lot of the natural world works, but it doesn't make good gameplay. So we pivoted to a race to make it more strategically interesting. I thought "why do hummingbirds fight for feeders? What was their end goal?" and the answer was "surviving and mating". Surviving wasn't interesting enough for quick-paced game like this, so mating it was. It also allowed for some cheeky double entendres (thirsty for nectar... and a mate).
When pivoting to a race for courting, I needed to make the game a big longer than just "fight for nectar" and "win a mate". Building the nest seemed the most logical choice, but it was the one largest compromise I made between accuracy to nature and gameplay (which I make a note of at the end of the rulebook). Technically, females build the nest and males do the courting call. In this game, you do both. Removing any of those elements made the game slightly less interesting, so we decided to keep both in and let people experience being both male and female birds through the game.
Generally speaking, so much of nature lends itself to competitive gameplay and game theory: competing for resources, risking resource expenditure for a bigger edge, balancing cooperation with opportunism, survival of the fittest, etc. People forget that nature is both beautiful and brutal. There's enough drama and tension in nature for endless stories and games.
So to bullet point out the main points...
The key to creating something both accurate to nature and engaging in gameplay came down to:
1) Doing deep research in hummingbirds to understand how they actually fought and acted, and why they did it.
2) Identifying specific aspects in the natural behaviors that would lend well to strategic gameplay
3) Understanding the story and pacing of the gameplay and staying in line with it
Asymmetry, Strategy & Player Interaction
Hover emphasizes cutthroat strategy and asymmetric powers, where players must fight, flirt, bluff, and outmaneuver their rivals. How did you approach designing player interaction so that every match feels dynamic without becoming overly chaotic or predictable?
I wanted a game that reward careful planning and strategy but had a high amoutn interaction and player-to-player engagement. Predictability comes from strategy, whereas chaos comes from luck and from people. Euro games are great with strategy and planning, but lack chaos because most of them are akin to playing solitaire with friends. Low interaction = low chaos. However, the typical "take that" game bring so much chaos to the game that you mostly win by luck. I thought a good balance of interaction and strategy should resemble a war game, where strategy is 100% needed, but there is also an element of understanding the unpredictable nature of directly playing against a human opponent.
Hover also takes heavy influence from classic game theory. From the start, the game positions everyone as an enemy, but collaboration with others is actually highly beneficial. However, too much trust can leave you vulnerable. This naturally creates a healthy tension at the table. There is a constant paranoia, but also increasing incentive to collaborate and trust.
In the end, the game requires strategy to win, but a large part of that strategy is understanding your table and the players involved. You need to mind and engage with them if you want to win. If you treat it like a game of solitaire, your plans will be disrupted.
Building a Distinct Visual & Thematic Identity
Between its hand-drawn artwork, nature-inspired theme, and surprisingly ruthless tone, Hover has a very distinctive personality. How did you develop the game’s artistic direction to capture both the beauty of hummingbirds and the intensity of their real-world behavior?
Oooh this took A LONG TIME. My wife and I struggled a lot with the art direction. This wasn't solely because of the game. We just have two very distinct perspectives. I knew that the fans of this game would really appreciate photo-realistic dramatic birds. I also wanted to show the birds in ways that was different than most "hummingbird art". When people think of hummingbirds, they often think of how pretty they are. While I wanted to capture that, I wanted people to see so much more in them. One of the coolest things about the birds are their aerial abilities (thus the name "hover"). So I wanted enough images of the birds in unique poses. Trouble is that a lot of those unique flying poses don't showcase their most prominent feature, their gorget, very well. So finding and creating references was difficult. Lastly, everything had to be accurate - the birds (including feather count, feather notches, coloring, etc) AND the flowers (had to be hummingbird flowers).
My wife wanted this game to be unique and have strong presence. It should feel like a living, interactive art piece. Not just pretty illustrations slapped onto mechanics. The game and art had to meld together for a cohesive, immersive experience. Every piece should feel frame-worthy but also something you want to hold and play with. And she also wanted to do stuff she liked, and she has very particular taste (much better than mine).
The bird art had to be accurate but also striking. It had to show the birds in the light that the game was capturing them, but also showcase the color and beauty that everyone expects from a hummingbird game. After iterating through several styles, we finally concluded on the one we have for the bird art.
For the field cards, we wanted something that was visually striking and captured the energy of the birds and game. My wife has much more modern and funkier taste than I do, so she came up with modern movie poster-esque style cards with a huge pop of color mixed with sketch art of the birds. It was an instant hit with playtesters and unlike anything I've seen in another game. That was something I trusted wholeheartedly to her, and I think it captured the game's feeling very well.
We struggled the most with the board. We originally had something very painterly and realistic, much like the birds on the card. But after some playtesting with that board, we found that people were often confusing borders of the various areas, missing vital key points of information on the board, and losing sight of their pieces. So while the board was stunning, we had to lean in a different direction to heavily increase usability, legibility and playability. As a result, we leaned into the direction of the field cards. Simple, loose lines with strong pops of color. We kept it flat and avoid too much complexity. This made the borders clear and the area actions visible.
The box cover had to then meld all of these elements together, which I think we did a decent job of. Though you can see how the styles are mixed together rather than fully cohesive with every part. This was our first major project together. We learned a lot on how to meld our tastes and perspectives together for something cohesive. We have a few ideas for more games in the future, and I think we'll be in much better sync for those.
Hummingbirds are already so visually striking. The key was to find which parts we wanted to highlight and which parts we needed to tone down to get the right feeling and direction. We had a strong sense of what we wanted, though it was different between the two of us. We stuck with a series of core values that became our true north: Immersive, Beautiful, Interactive, Strategic, Tactile.
That inspired our company's name: IBIST, or Ibis Tea. :)
From Nature Concept to Kickstarter Campaign
Hover combines scientific inspiration, strong thematic design, and competitive tabletop mechanics into a unique board game experience. Why was Kickstarter the right platform to launch this project, and what do you hope the community will help you build beyond this first release?
Hover's primary demographic are nature buffs and hummingbird fans, I believe this may be the first hobby board game some of our backers have ever bought. The hobby gamer is not the first focus. We didn't make a heavy euro or multi-session campaign game. We made soething that was quick to the table, easy to teach to non-gamers, and highly immersive. Kickstarter is great because it doesn't just appeal to gamers. There are a lot of art enthusiasts, outdoors enthusiasts and craft enthusiasts on Kickstarter that fit within the parameters of our target audience.
Other platforms like Gamefound are specifically targeted towards the hobby gamer group. We didn't think Hover fit that demographic.
Hover is also a premium product built with a lot of passion and heart; it didn't feel right to go directly to a publisher. We would lose too much control in the process.
For those reasons, Kickstarter seemed the best choice. It was a LOT of work, but we're so grateful for all our backers and supporters the entire way. Our community greatly helped us understand what was most important to them. Our Kickstarter promo featuring endangered hummingbirds was something our prelaunch followers helped vote for. However, during that process we also received many requests for solo & co-op modes. That's why we created an expansion featuring solo/co-op play (and it's quite good, my wife, sister-in-law, and all my cozy gamer friends prefer it).
Beyond the first release, I'm just hoping our community truly enjoys the game and every detail we poured into it.
We have plans for more games that are equally immersive, beautifuly, interactive, strategic and tactile that are based on real things in nature. I'm hoping our community will enjoy Hover enough to support our future games, cause it was a lot of fun to make Hover (and we'd love to keep making more games like it).
Our discussion with the creators behind Hover hummingbird board game on Kickstarter reveals a project that understands something many nature lovers and tabletop players eventually discover: wildlife is already full of tension, rivalry, resource management, bluffing, and risk-reward decisions. Rather than forcing a theme onto abstract mechanics, Hover appears built from the actual behavioral logic of the animals that inspired it.
What makes the campaign stand out is its willingness to sit between audiences. It speaks to strategy gamers looking for interaction and asymmetry, but also to bird enthusiasts, art lovers, and players who may be discovering hobby board games for the first time. Between its research foundation, strong visual identity, and surprisingly ruthless take on hummingbird behavior, Hover feels less like a conventional animal game and more like a competitive slice of natural history translated onto the tabletop.
About the Creator
IBIST (Ibis Tea) is a creative studio founded around a shared interest in nature, strategy games, science, and tactile design. Combining gameplay development with hand-crafted illustration and research-driven worldbuilding, the team focuses on creating immersive tabletop experiences inspired by real phenomena from the natural world.
For Hover, the founders combined extensive hummingbird research, asymmetric game design, and a distinctive visual direction shaped by both scientific accuracy and strong artistic personality. The result is a project designed to feel beautiful, strategic, interactive, and deeply connected to the natural behaviors that inspired it.
FAQ about Hover Hummingbird Board Game on Kickstarter
What is Hover?
Hover is a competitive strategy board game inspired by real hummingbird behavior, combining territorial conflict, nectar gathering, nest building, and courtship mechanics.
Is Hover based on real hummingbird biology?
Yes. The game draws heavily from hummingbird research, including feeding competition, aggressive territorial behavior, species differences, and ecological strategies.
Is Hover designed for experienced hobby gamers only?
No. According to the creators, the game was designed to be quick to teach, immersive, and approachable for non-gamers while still offering meaningful strategy and player interaction.
What makes the artwork in Hover distinctive?
The game combines hand-drawn bird illustration, strong use of color, modern graphic design influences, and an emphasis on both biological accuracy and tabletop usability.
Why launch Hover on Kickstarter?
The creators saw Kickstarter as the best fit for a project aimed not only at hobby gamers but also at nature enthusiasts, art lovers, and audiences interested in immersive passion projects.
About the Author
Sarah Nowak
Senior Author at GizmoCrowd
Sarah has been covering tabletop games, RPGs, comics, and creative campaigns on Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Gamefound for over 5 years.
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