We, Hannes and Kristiina, are tea farmers in Georgia who love to play board games with our family. One winter we started to think that it would be cool to have a tea farm board game and not finding anything that would interest us, we decided to create our own. So, together with Hannes' son Marten, we started to craft the idea of a tea plantation board game.
When creating this game, we made it the way we like games ourselves - enough strategic planning, but not too serious or too long, so it would be fun to play together with children or teenagers as well.
The game has been ripening for almost a year and we now feel it is ready to be brought out to the public!
We hope you enjoy it as well :)
Our farm, Renegade Tea Estate, was born in 2017, when 5 people from Estonia and Lithuania discovered that there are hundreds of abandoned tea plantations in Georgia, looking for someone to give them a new lease on life. None of us had experience with tea or farming, and none of us had seen a real tea plantation before, but the sad story of abandoned tea fields and villages inspired us enough to jump into unknown waters to see if we can revive at least some of those old plantations.
Now, 5 years later, we have a working tea farm with more than 30 hectares of tea, 60 workers and a small tea factory. We also have more than 2000 families sourcing their tea directly from our farm every year and some of the finest tea shops from US to France sell our products. At first look it might sound as a wonderful success story, but in reality, it has been a challenging journey with ups and downs and over the years we have been several times close to falling off the cliff. We found a common language with local communities, we learned how to produce interesting and good teas, but we did not imagine what a long journey it would be to revive plantations that have been abandoned and wild for 30 years.
We have tried to put some of our adventures, surprises, failures and successes into this game. It is just a game, but hopefully you will also learn a bit about tea farming in real life and maybe we will meet one day at our factory door and we can take a walk at the real Renegade, Rioni or Mandikori Estate.
If visiting us seems too big of an effort, you can find out more at www.renegadetea.com.
