Building gardens like a...

We enjoyed the 🌿 Garden Nation demo at the Bombyx booth and were eager to take the game home, because it seemed like it could be one of the few area control games we could enjoy at 2p.🥰

👉 In this fairly abstract game 2-4 clans try to build their city in a garden and compete in dominating the 7 areas of it. The rules are easy to learn, but forging better strategies takes practice.
There are only 2 possible actions: either you build by paying “inhabitants” from your player board or you abandon one of your buildings and get twice the cost back.

👉 The game ends if a player places their last building. When this happens, players score points for their leftover inhabitants, their secret objectives and their completed common projects during the game. These objectives require you to build on specific colored spots, to specific heights or matching adjacency requirements.

👉 The most important twist in the game is paying attention to the tortoise 🐢 crane! If you look at the board, you can see that not only does it have 7 tiles, but each area is also divided into 7 spots to take actions on, that are laid out in exactly the same pattern as the area tiles. You have to take an action on the area where the turtle is, then move it to the tile that corresponds to the spot you selected.

You need to think about what you want to do 🧐, and how to get the crane there (if you can) and where does that leave it - your choice just might be setting up a great opportunity for your opponent or it could deny them. 😉
In this you have some agency: all players except the first have 2 actions each turn.

👉 When the round ends, you get inhabitants based on the areas you control, then the player who was the last becomes the first player. Interesting is, that in a 3-4p game the current player chooses who takes the next turn (in 2p the turn order just alternates).

💬 We loved our play and can’t wait to get it to the table it again! It is a crunchy (but mostly peaceful) puzzle against your opponent but occasionally you can spice things up by taking one of the limited special actions and invade their buildings - but that can cost you a lot 😉