We ruddy love a cozy board game round these parts, don’t we? Nothing gruesome or scary or intense, just the gamification of some lovely and relaxing theme or activity that allows your woes to drift away and do some woeing to some other sad sack. For every violent dungeon crawler in which you boink anything green and snarly on the head with an axe, there’s a game about dragons who want to run all the shops in a village. For every sci-fi epic where you blast aliens in the face with your face blaster, there’s a game about collecting fish. I like the head bopping and face blasting, but I’ve also got plenty of room for something as wholesome as this.
Got your cup of tea and a few light nibbles ready? Comfy seat at the table with a few cushions? Lovely, let’s see what we’re here to do!
Propagation Station is an auction and tableau game for 2-4 players from Chain Assembly. Each player is looking to cultivate a thriving house plant collection by bidding on a variety of plants and equipment. (This organised approach is not what happens in our house: plants and flowers arrive at random points in time, and their survival depends more on pure good luck than any kind of green-fingered skill. If you’re a plant, don’t come round ours.) You’ll try to outbid your opponents, but beware: winning means sharing your bid with them! It’s a balancing act between acquiring plants and ensuring the ones you already have grow. Optimize your setup – among the equipment you can get are grow lights – and ward off pests that can chomp up leaves. Your turns will be full of choices: nurture your plants, expand your collection, or disrupt your rivals?
Propagation Station features 80+ plant cards along with 24+ equipment cards. This allows players to build new strategies in each game for an untold number of combinations and growth potential. No two games will turn out the same. The rules are simple for quick learning. Strategic depth emerges with each turn, as color-coded elements guide players through distinct phases. The included player aid ensures smooth gameplay, making it easy to dive into the world of plant propagation. No downtime here-everyone plays their turns all together, keeping the game flowing smoothly. This simultaneous gameplay means no waiting, just continuous action and engagement for everyone at the table.
There’s an add-on available for solo gardeners too, the brilliantly named House Plant Hermit mode, which includes rules and components to relax on your own while tending the plants.
I will say that this is a more in depth game than you might expect – game time is listed as 90-120 minutes, which indicates to me that the first round or two will see you building your engine before you start to see the results. This suits me fine – I consider this length of game to be a ‘Sunday afternoon’ game, where you’ve got a chunk of time free to settle in with an experience (my ‘Sunday afternoon’ games don’t always happen on a Sunday afternoon, hence the ‘inverted commas’).
This game is already fully funded, but don’t worry, there’s plenty of time left to get involved. Head here for more info, it might be a game worth branching into.
Steve is currently a freelance board game blogger, but often dreams of life as a pirate, or as a ghost herder in the Lake District, or as an evil estate agent who sells haunted houses for his own dark pleasure. Instead of figuring out how to do these jobs in real life like a normal lunatic, he tries to write about them instead, and releases the resultant books upon the unsuspecting world via famous digital bookstores. More books are bound to follow. Find this peculiar entity here: www.instagram.com/positively.board
