Ah, Autumn, season of mists and overused poetry. Or, if you’re one of my children, raking leaves. My kids, for some reason, see the garden as a form of cruel and unusual torture that’s against the Geneva Convention. Perhaps the recent flurry of garden themed games can bring them round? Because there are a lot just now that really lean into nature and the natural world, cosy or otherwise.
So, how does your garden grow?
Alice’s Garden by me (Sam de Smith)
In this delightful, Wonderland themed game, you must plant the best garden for the Queen of Hearts, drawing Tetris style tiles (4 adjoining squares) and taking turns to place, with different pieces scoring according to their final positions: Chessmen on the tiled path, pairs of mushrooms, rows of trees, and groups of roses .
Alice’s Garden is a really lovely game, lots of fun and we were all certainly taken with it. It’s not dissimilar to other such polyomino games – we were immediately reminded of Patchwork Doodle – but is a bit more intuitive, particularly when it comes to scoring. It can be a little tricky for younger players to focus on a single strategy, as they’ll often rush to fill the garden, and then end up either with odd gaps or sub-par groups; it’s good to guide them towards a specific strategy, such as filling the chessboard or building a rose garden.
Any gaps in the final garden will lose your points but luckily Gardeners give you extra single square tiles in the endgame if placed adjacent to one another – just make sure you don’t have any left over or…off with your head!
Floriferous by Imogen Usher
If you’re looking for something that’s relaxing to play and beautiful to look at Floriferous is a perfect choice. Each turn players stroll through rows of flowers, collecting blossoms, sculptures, and insects to build a tranquil tableau. It’s a really clever integration of theme as Floriferous rewards mindfulness over cut-throat tactics your garden flourishes through harmony and balance.
Played over three rounds, or days, each turn players choose a flower from a shared display, but the order in which you move determines what’s left for others. You need to collect cards to meet your personal goals as well as the bounty card for each day. Just like the cycle of planting and harvesting in your garden, timing matters in this game, but so does your planning. Matching colours or specific symbols will help you meet any ‘arrangement’ goals you’ve selected, much like tending to a garden with a vision in mind.
If you’d rather grow herbs in your kitchen garden, then Herbaceous in the same series is also excellent. I love both, but Floriferous has a little extra to think about adding a little crunch. Although it’s still very quick playing. As well as great gameplay, the watercolour art style is like a beautiful botanical sketchbook, and you can admire what you and your opponents are creating. Just like being in my garden it feels relaxing and mindful, but much less rainy!
Pergola by Sophie Jones
Despite having no green thumbs – in fact, plants tend to die just by being in my presence – most of my board game collection revolves around the great outdoors and gardening. What can I say? This way, I can watch my garden flourish without having to painstakingly water real plants.
One game I picked up this year at UKGE was Pergola. This two to four player game is all about building up your garden through various set collections. You’ll plant flowers, entice insects and collect lanterns to earn extra bonuses. Everything you gather ends up on your personal board, and here’s the best bit: each board shows a different garden scene, and where you place your flowers is completely up to you. Over the course of the game, you’ll see your garden bloom, and by the end, even if you don’t win, you’ll still want to take a photo of your board because, well, it’s beautiful.
But this game isn’t just aesthetically pleasing. With its tactile components, it’s fun to play and has a fantastic table presence. The insert makes setup easy, and the simple ruleset means it’s super accessible for both gamers and non-gamers alike. Despite its simplicity, there’s plenty of mechanical depth. By collecting certain combinations of plants and insects, you can boost your score, and there’s no single tried-and-tested path to victory.
Some might find the set collection loop a little repetitive, but I enjoy how your actions are guided by spades, trowels and hoes, each one shaping what you can do each round.
If you love gardening and watching flowers bloom in all their vibrant colours, Pergola captures that perfectly. The creativity and freedom you have when building your board give a real sense of accomplishment, even in defeat. It’s calming and cosy, yet crunchy enough to keep you coming back for another game.
3 Garden Gems by L.N. Hunter
Meadow
The story of Meadow is that you and up to three companions are wandering through a picturesque landscape, observing nature and making small discoveries. What this translates to is drawing charmingly illustrated cards from a shared 4×4 grid, and if you can satisfy their requirements, gaining scoring points by playing them into your ‘meadow.’ For example, you pick up a venus flytrap card, which requires that you already have a beetle tag in your display, which might be provided by a bee card, that you played on a tree earlier, and so on. The card drawing mechanism is quite clever: you slot one of your five numbered ‘path tokens’ into the edge of the shared grid, taking the card from the position corresponding to the chosen slot and the number on the token; since you only have one of each number and once a slot is filled, it can’t be used again in this round, there’re plenty of chances for other players to mess with your choice, or you can easily step on your own toes. There is a bit more to the game than this (the ‘campfire’ where you can perform alternate actions as well as potentially score extra points), but that’s the primary mechanism. If I have one criticism of the game, it’s that it’s over way too quickly; it feels like you’re counting the final score before you’ve had a chance to grow your meadow very much.
This is a fun strategy game with an intriguing card drafting mechanism. You can find a full review elsewhere on the blog.
Forest Shuffle
Forest Shuffle is a pleasantly compact game (well, the box is—your habitat can end up sprawling over quite an area!) for 2–5 players. The game’s mainly about recognising and playing high-scoring patterns from your hand. The basis of your habitat is a collection of trees of various sorts, around which you place gorgeously illustrated animals and fungi. The cards all show two different critters, split either top/bottom or left/right, and when you play a card, you choose one side to play; additionally, when you place the card, that occupies the corresponding side of the tree, thus you can place only four cards around each tree (with a few exceptions for some types of animal). Each type of card contributes differently to scoring; for example, an individual butterfly scores zero, but if you have a several different species of butterfly, then each can score a rapidly rising number of points; or a golden eagle scores depending on what prey animals you’ve got—combinations are what matter in this game. As well as this, some cards offer bonuses such as drawing or playing extra cards. One of the nicely brain-taxing things about the game is that playing a card costs other cards, so you have to decide which you think will score best and keep your fingers crossed that you’re not sacrificing something important. Scoring your habitat can be fiddly and tedious—if, like me, you’re too impatient to do it yourself, there’s a brilliant third-party app which uses your phone’s camera and some image recognition to calculate your score, a tree at a time.
A quick and pretty game. You can find a full review elsewhere on the blog.
Mycelia
Can a game about fungi be fun? Yes! Mycelia is a thoroughly enjoyable and thinky game for 1–4 players (an expansion takes that to 5) revolving around planting a variety of mushrooms, spreading spores across a growing map and letting them eventually decay to earn points. It’s a fairly quick game to play, but with a couple of different strategy elements to keep your brain working: you need to manoeuvre your mushrooms into appropriate spaces on the map such that spores will end up where you need them in order to fruit the cards in your hand (but keep your fingers crossed the wind’s blowing in the right direction); and all the while, you need to keep an eye on where opponents are placing their tokens in case they block your plans or ‘steal’ your spores—and, of course, you’re trying to do exactly the same to them. It’s a game with a high production quality: gorgeously illustrated mushroom cards, chunky player mats and board tiles, and cute wooden mushroom tokens.
A nice mix of strategy and luck… and a lot of very pretty mushroom cards. You can find a full review elsewhere on the blog.
Flourish by Ian Pazceck
If you have, let’s say, *friction* with your neighbours, then the thing to do is just smile and wave over the hedge and eventually the disagreements will pass. Flourish is that game. You are building your own garden and passing cards over the hedge to your neighbours on either side. Each turn you play cards face down – one card to your own garden and pass one to card over the hedge to the neighbour on your right and one card over the hedge to your left. All play is simultaneous, so you will find that you have received in kind two cards from your neighbours and you can replenish your hand by drawing from the deck. A round ends after everyone has played a row of three cards to their own garden. The full game takes place over three normal rounds and a final, fourth, cleanup round which has no card passing – you simply play the cards remaining in your hand.
You are collecting symbols to score at end of round and end of game. There are five different possible plant symbols and one or more of these may appear on the left side of the cards. In the top left corner there may be an end of round scoring condition and at the bottom right there may be an end of game scoring condition. The bottom left corner may have a stone symbol, which may contribute to end of game scoring.
The pass and play aspect of this game means there is plenty of player interaction and it’s a thorny problem to pick the best card for your garden while denying opportunities to your neighbours. The simultaneous play means it’s a quick game with no downtime, but the scoring has enough crunch to keep it interesting.
