Frango Morango — A Wacky Card Game of Negotiation & Communication

Once upon a Frango Morango…

Frango Morango is an innovative forced negotiation card game where you have to trade your wacky crops with other farmers to feed your Piggy.

One harvest morning, you woke up to the strangest sight. Your fields were filled with apples and strawberries, sure… but also chickens, hay bales, and times? They could even talk, but only in Portuguese for some reason.

Lucky for you, your Piggy will eat just about anything, especially anything Portuguese. So, you pack up your wacky crops and head to the Harvest Fair to enter the Fattest Piggy Contest!

Gameplay

A Frango Morango counteroffer cards battle!

In Frango Morango, you’ll be paying close attention to what other people have and what they want. It’s like the negotiation part in Settlers of Catan, but if the other player was forced to trade with you. It sounds extreme, I know, but it’s not like you have nothing to defend yourself with.

Each player is equipped with counteroffer cards, which allow them to change the deal in their favor. You can take your crop cards out of the negotiation or force the other player to put in some of their own. You can say “No!” to a deal in all sorts of ways, as long as you say it with cards. There’s a card to get more, a card to give less, one for refusing and another for convincing, and even a card to take some time to think. With a little luck and strategy, you can negotiate to the top, no matter the deal.

Negotiating can be scary, but in the end, you’ll find there’s no other way to get what you want. You’ll have to feed your Piggy the best crops to win the game, but it only has space in its belly for three of the five types available. That means you’ll have to trade the other two types with the other players. Every Piggy is unique, so you’ll definitely find a farmer that’s willing to trade, and if they’re not…. well, they better have good counteroffer cards.

After six rounds of wacky deals at the Harvest Fair, you’ll have experienced alliances, betrayals, redemptions, and more. The deal of the day could let you get three crops from another player in exchange for only one of yours, or the deal could force you to give up a crop to another player from the “kindness” of your heart — you can never be quite sure what deal will pop up next. After all deal cards have been used, it will be time to weigh your piggies. To win, you’ll have to strike a balance between making aggressive offers or playing nice to keep the peace. Every game is different!

Why Frango Morango?

Forest Studio circle time in progress.

Frango Morango is the first game we ever designed; just a humble tutor and a homeschooling family in Portugal. Hence the name Frango Morango, which means Chicken Strawberry in Portuguese. I could tell you there was a clever and profound reason for choosing this name, but really… it’s just fun to say.

We chose Frango Morango as our first game because of its power to teach our kids soft skills and emotional intelligence. Our aim is always to create fun-first educational board games. The idea was to teach the principles of Non-Violent Communication (Marshall B. Rosenberg): empathy, clarity, vulnerability, emotions, and more. As it evolved, the game’s message became distilled into one small but very important lesson: how to say “No!”

We want our kids to be resilient and independent thinkers. We want them to be kind and empathetic but always to seek out what they want and protect their boundaries because nobody else can do it for them. Not being taught these social-emotional skills can lead to a life of people-pleasing and anxiety from denying yourself what you really want. How do we teach people these critical mental health skills?

Fede is thinking about how to talk about his feelings.

Our kids were very resistant to talking about their feelings. They hated when we named their emotions and hardly ever wanted to talk about their day and what they liked or disliked. Creating a space for vulnerability is really hard, especially if you schedule it (and you kind of have to do it as a teacher). But when an opportunity arises spontaneously, it’s very easy to forget to model things like mindfulness or non-violent communication. It’s all just a bit boring and hard to integrate, even for adults.

So, we thought it’d be simpler to design a fun board game that captured and emulated the skills of empathy and setting clear boundaries. It absolutely was NOT simpler, but it has been more fun. At the time, our 10-year-old loved playing Catan, especially the part where we got to negotiate and trade resources. It was really the only board game we were familiar with back then, but negotiation is also a great place to practice setting and defending boundaries. That’s what inspired us to make a forced negotiation card game to practice setting boundaries and the many different ways of saying “No!”

Skills to Thrive in Wacky Wonky Worlds

Fede and Pao are playing one of the early versions of Frango Morango.

Our focus was always to create a game that was fun-first. We wanted it to be an educational game, but we didn’t want it to be EDUCATIONAL. At first, we tried to incorporate mechanics from the only other board game we had, Exploding Kittens. It was a big success with the kids, but it was total chaos, and it emphasized the “take that!” aspects of the game. Still, even with insane cards like “Brainwash” or “Roll-the-Die,” we found that the game was already working.

The real magic was in the counteroffer cards. The names of the cards were a simple and easy-to-remember way of learning the options you have during a negotiation. “You can always refuse even if they try to convince you.” “You can ask for time to think, and the deal won’t go away.” “You can ask for more if you want/need.” “You can change the deal if you don’t like it.” We were able to deliver all these empowering words in times of stress, and our kids not only listened but found comfort, agency, and even tools within them! We gained a shared language and context we can use to talk about stressful social situations, how they make us feel, and what we can do to navigate them.

We designed the game to be fun, and that’s what it is. That’s why we can leverage it to teach our kids something analogous, but it does [not] magically teach kids emotional intelligence (if it did, it wouldn’t be fun). An adult always has to put in the work. That being said, the game definitely gives players the words to be assertive and puts them in situations where they need to use them to stand up for themselves. That’s quite a head start, and it’s as far as we can go without getting preachy; it’s up to the users to reflect on the game and take what social-emotional learning they find the more they play.

Frango Morango can only plant a seed of [not] boredom into something as dense as emotional intelligence. It starts out playful, but eventually, you start to reflect, and then you start to experiment in real life. Before you know it, interest in soft skills went from [not] boring to full-blown passion and desire for mastery. Today, we can talk to our kids much more painlessly about their emotions. They are more communicative and understand themselves better, and we’ve gotten this far largely thanks to our journey designing Frango Morango.

Games are for Learning

We have always believed that games have a huge potential for education. When you’re entertained, you are feeling; that’s when your brain is primed for learning, and just recently, we’ve seen it first hand. And there are so many interesting and wild things to learn out there. We’ve just been sold that learning is boring and hard. Our dream is to change that perception and plant seeds of [not] boredom on top of many fertile subjects and skills. Our first attempt is ready for testing!

The different iterations of the Frango Morango game prototype.

Frango Morango has come a long way since the print-and-play prototypes we illustrated to the best of our ability. We have refined the game mechanics and designs and now have the components of a fun, exciting, and unpredictable game. With our innovative forced-negotiation mechanic, there’s no choice but to learn while playing. In the very unlikely event that you come out no more emotionally aware than before, at least you’ll have learned five words in Portuguese!

Frango Morango is our passion project, blending innovative gameplay and wacky and whimsical storytelling with crucial life soft skills and emotional intelligence. The game is coming soon to Kickstarter and we need your support to get it to the homes of families in need of a little fun and a little healthy communication.

If you have trouble saying “No,” then you won’t mind supporting our Kickstarter. And if you don’t need any help, then you should have no problem winning, right? Either way, you can join our mailing list to test your skills in this wacky card game!

Frango Morango’s Kickstarter announcement post.

Join us on this journey to redefine learning through play.

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