Fans of match and merge games will immediately be gripped by Longleaf Valley. You play as biologist Ash Williams who’s working to restore a valley to its former idyllic glory. Plant trees and shrubs, clear debris and rescue animals – all while merging and upgrading like-for-like items on a board while managing your resources so you don’t run out of space or energy.

So far, so familiar. Yet the difference with Longleaf Valley is that alongside your in-game resources, you’re also collecting Tree Tokens. These don’t progress the story or boost your virtual valley. Instead, they’re used to plant real trees in the real world.

“Everyone’s an environmentalist at heart, but actually most people don’t really know what to do, where to start or how to help,” says Laura Carter, CEO and co-founder of TreesPlease Games, the studio behind Longleaf Valley. “I felt that presenting solutions to people in a very simple, low friction, easy impact kind of way was a great idea.”

Carter has always had a passion for conservation. As a child she would fundraise and scrape together pocket money to donate to charities such as the RSPCA and Greenpeace. Later, while working in the games industry, Carter would spend any available free time attending climate protests and manning charity phone lines.

It was while working on an HIV/AIDS awareness and fundraising campaign in NaturalMotion’s CSR Racing 2 that Carter realised she could bring her activism directly into her work. Her idea? To create a games studio with an environmental conscience. She co-founded TreesPlease in 2019, launching Longleaf as the studio’s first game in 2023.

With its emphasis on tree planting, the aim of Longleaf Valley is not just to be a fun game to play, but to also be a force for good in the world. Carter says it’s important for her that players feel a sense of ownership over the trees they’re helping to plant, and to understand the positive impact their actions can have.

That real-world impact is mind-boggling. According to TreesPlease, since the game’s launch in 2023, players have helped fund the planting of more than 2 million trees across six countries. That’s the equivalent of reforesting hundreds of football pitches, offsetting the emissions of tens of thousands of flights and saving dozens of acres of sea ice.

“It still feels quite surreal,” Carter says. “It’s actually real trees that we planted, real jobs that we provided, there’s actually carbon that we’ve removed and animals that have thrived because of that.”

For Carter, LongLeaf Valley isn’t just about getting trees planted in the real world, it’s also finding approachable ways to teach players about environmental issues more broadly. The game shows off the positive impacts of conservation work by, for example, having animals return to their habitats as you progress.

There are also in-game events that address other important environmental issues such as the Ocean Rescue activity that tasked players with cleaning up discarded fishing nets to highlight the impact of fishing on the world’s marine life.

Back on the ground, there’s much more to planting trees than picking a spot and getting out a shovel. TreesPlease has partnered with the landscape restoration non-profit Eden: People+Planet for its planting. The organisation carefully picks its planting spots – mainly choosing locations that have historically been forests and planting indigenous species.

“We’re really trying to do reforestation and restoration, not just tree planting,” says Eden CEO Bryan Adkins. “If in year two all of those trees that you planted are dead because they were on the wrong sites, they were in places where forests shouldn’t grow or they were in an area that burns frequently, then you really haven’t had a huge impact,” he explains. “A race to the bottom for the cheapest trees is just an avenue towards aggressive greenwashing.”

Carter’s hope is that TreesPlease’s work will eventually stretch far beyond tree planting to encompass a range of environmental issues, making the studio a destination for giving in gaming.

“I’d love people to play our game and feel like there are other people who care about protecting the planet,” Carter says. “I want to give people hope and provide a place for them to play and to feel like they can make a difference.”