The Gardens

I finally got to play The Gardens yesterday. This is a boardgame set within the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden, so has a fun (relatively) local angle for me.

The aim is to take cards from a pool in the centre, and lay them on your board to build up a garden. Each time you lay a card, the meeple on that row moves from the position it's currently at to the new card. You then collect a score for the walk, which is based on what's on the card you laid and what cards the meeple passed over during its walk.

Here's the setup, before any cards have been played.

And meeples on the attractive scoreboard.

A turn in, and our gardens are starting to take shape. The cards feature items such as paths, streams, fountains, benches, trees and statues, and each item scores differently. Some, such as benches, score during the turn only, some, such as statues, only score at the end of the game and some things - trees and streams - score both during and at the end of the game.

After three turns I have a stream to the right of my board and a nice network of paths to the left.

The game ends when the players fill up their board. Here's our completed gardens; I won this game due to some strong statue placement and an extensive network of paths.

My one niggle with the game. One of the stretch goals was this wooden ibis which is given to the person who goes first in each turn. But try as we might we couldn't get it to stand up. It makes no difference to the game, but we were slightly disappointed.

Catherine and I played a second game after Maya dropped out. There's a small change to the way cards are placed in teh centre for two players, which makes for some interesting choices, but otherwise it's identical. Catherine's tree-based strategy gave her a big win over my streams in this game.

I don't know if The Gardens will set the world on fire in terms of gameplay or mechanisms, but it is nice to have an Australian-designed game with an Australian theme in the collection, and it was certainly fun to play and attractive to look at. There are advanced options for different scoring, as well as one featuring landmarks that are visible from the Botanic Gardens, such as the Bridge, Opera House, State Library, Art Gallery and so forth. These can be collected by players and it gives them additional scoring opportunities. The rules-book has information on the various plants, locations and birds featured in the game.

All in all, I'm glad I backed this.

(Note - my copy of the game has a few bits that were only available for backers of the kickstarter, so the off-the -shelf version might look a little different.)

52 Games - Game 62