As green as it gets

🪴Verdant (aka. Sattgrün on the German market by Kosmos ) is a game about buying and cultivating houseplants and cleverly organizing them in your house to create the most cozy home. 🥰 It’s easy to learn and it is a breeze to play, yet it has that satisfying crunch factor I love in games. 👍 Decisions matter and you will be engaged throughout each of your 13 turns, as you finish your tableau.

Verdant has this “paired-drafting” mechanic you might know from Cascadia or Luna Capital, but it’s even more interesting here. 🧐 You see, even though you pick a pair of things (a card and an object), you always choose from groups of 3 things: a room card, a plant card and an object, so there is bigger flexibility. To make them more attractive, unchosen cards get some tokens that can be used for useful effects.

Your house is built with room cards and plant cards in a 5x3 grid and a checkerboard pattern. ☝️ Rooms all want a specific plant type next to them and show some kind of lightning ☀️ condition on their edges. Plant cards have favored light conditions, so placing them next to an ideal room will let them grow. 🌱 This is what you primarily want to do: grow plants by adding Verdancy tokens on them until they are completed, so they earn you points at the end. There is also a fun racing element, 🏃 as there are pot tokens you can place on completed plant cards that are worth points.

The objects you can draft are either one-use things like a watering can or fertilizer, that help you grow plants, or they are furniture/pets 🪑, which are used for a big set-collection scoring at the end. These have to be placed into rooms, so you have limited spots. If you match the object’s color with the room’s color, you double the points of that room, which is another cool layer to decision making. 🙂 If that’s not enough, you can also play with 3 end-game objective cards that greatly influence the way you make your tableau.

💬 To me Verdant is one of those gateway games that is really fun to play even as a seasoned gamer. It is so satisfying when you find that card or object that you are looking for! 🤩