Explore the Horror of Weird Alien Plants in the Tabletop Game Exclusion Zone Botanist

By Cameron Kunzelman | July 24, 2025 | 3:00pm

Tabletop Features exclusion zone botanist

Explore the Horror of Weird Alien Plants in the Tabletop Game Exclusion Zone Botanist

I spend a lot of my life trying to figure out what the hell things are. I’m out in my garden, often piddling, and I am presented with several things. Sometimes I planted those things, and I appreciate my tomatoes and my basil. Sometimes I did not plant those things, and they are delightful surprises—a persimmon tree here, a zinnia there. The dreaded third possibility is where a weird thing that I cannot identify appears and it slowly begins to eat my garden alive. This is something I do not like in the real world.

It’s something that is really interesting in the solo game Exclusion Zone Botanist, though, which puts players in the shoes of an investigator of weird plants in a new, strange world. Pulling from zone fiction like Annihilation and Roadside Picnic, Exclusion Zone Botanist has players get out a sketchbook, roll on charts to see what kind of weird plants they encounter, and then draw those plants. This is not a game where you conquer the world or dominate the landscape. You’re an observer, moving carefully, trying not to get hurt.

For a game that is just about drawing in a notebook, it is a surprisingly horrific experience. Creator Exeunt Press calls out the early influence of Rainbow Six Extraction on the project in the foreword to the book, and the game does a very good job of adapting a particular kind of vulnerability. Alongside discovering plants in the Exclusion Zone, you also have to be worried about becoming a part of the Exclusion Zone. The place clearly eats people, and the longer you stay and the deeper you travel into the zone map, the more likely it is that you will not make it out alive.

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Exclusion Zone Botanist

For being less than 30 pages long, the game really manages to pack a punch in terms of mixing these different genre stances around. Playing a solo game can be a little weird to get into, since you’re rolling dice to determine what kind of plant you saw and then interpreting that with a pen and paper on your own time, but the loop of risk and reward feels immediately dangerous. I draw a plant, and I want to draw another one, but if I stay and do that I might end up dead. It’s a weird feeling to freak yourself out with a little booklet and some plant drawings, but that’s the power of the human imagination, I guess.

Exclusion Zone Botanist isn’t new; it was originally released a few years ago, but I recently ran across it in a store and picked it up on a whim. I live in a place that is experiencing strange climate collapse, in the way that many of you also are. It’s hotter than it used to be, and the rain comes more brutally than it used to, and different things populate my yard than they once did. Tree of heaven takes up a lot of my life, and I have to track it all around to make sure it doesn’t overtake the other plants I like; its friend, the spotted lanternfly, has made appearances in my state recently. Ticks are out of control. I feel like I am constantly identifying and navigating the natural world in a desperate attempt to gather knowledge, to prepare, and to make decisions about what I want to support and what I want to suppress. It’s tough, and it’s work that takes thought and consideration.

When I picked up Exclusion Zone Botanist, I thought maybe it would help make some of those feelings distant, like they were happening in another world to another person. That didn’t really happen. Instead, it just focused those broader feelings that I had into a really limited space of interaction where I could roll, think, draw, and contemplate what I thought the Exclusion Zone might look and be like. I found it refreshing.

Exclusion Zone Botanist is just as much game as it needs to be, and I think it’s the kind of thing that most people would enjoy sinking a couple contemplative hours into. The rulebook has some additional text about how to use it as a journaling game—writing out the full experience in the Zone—and I imagine that a lot of players could get some juice out of that, too. I recommend getting into the mix and using the game to imagine, and realize, your own alien flora. It’s happening all the time, after all. You can get a pdf copy of the game at the developer’s itch.io page or a printed version from their website.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.