The Gardens Review

Soothing water features. Winding walkways. Majestic bin chickens. What else could a person want in a beautiful botanical garden? It turns out that it’s up to you to decide! In The Gardens, players draft cards to design their own version of the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney, Australia. Will visitors to your corner of the gardens see a variety of delicate trees in bloom? Will they get to admire scenic statuary? Or will they be stuck on a dead-end path to nowhere? Play to find out in this tableau creation game for 1-4 players.

Gameplay Overview:

A score track with changeable scoring goal tiles is placed in the center of play. Each scoring goal corresponds to features in the garden card decks. Players are given their own board in three parts, a left, right, and center section. Assembled, the board has grid spots for 12 cards to be placed, divided into three rows (A, B, and C).

Throughout the game, players will take turns drafting cards with different garden features on them from the A, B, and C decks, placing them into their gardens strategically to try to earn the most points. Each row on the player board has its own meeple ‘tourist’ who activates when a new card is placed in their row. Some cards will score when the meeple travels through them, and some features accumulate points, scoring at the end of play.

In the end, the player who plans out the highest scoring garden wins the game.

Game Experience:

The Gardens is a very pleasant game. It has pleasant colors and pleasant art. There are happy little birds and pretty little fountains. The competition is gentle, and, once you understand scoring, it’s easy to teach and play. This is the kind of game that knows exactly what it wants to be, an easy-going showpiece, and delivers well on that promise. It’s a great choice for fans of aesthetic games like Wingspan and Flamecraft, looking for a light, but pretty, start to their game night.

With all this pleasantness in mind, it does allow for some scalable difficulty through different modes of play. There are more complex scoring objective options that can be swapped in once players have mastered the basics, and advanced boards with landmarks to complicate your building options. There is a solo mode, a two-player mode, and a 3-4 player mode. One qualm that I had was that the instructions for the two-player mode were scattered throughout the rulebook as asides to the 3-4 player instructions, which made it harder to look up what to do when we had questions.

Mechanically, The Gardens is very similar to another popular card game, Santa Monica (2020). They both revolve around creating an effectively laid out tiered tableaus for a tourist attraction, moving visitors around different locations and scoring points based on which landmarks the tourists see. What makes this game notable is not necessarily it’s mechanics, but it’s marriage to theme. The makers clearly have a reverence and appreciation for the Sydney Botanical Gardens. The location is celebrated in every aspect of the product, starting with the rulebook, which provides historical context and a land acknowledgement for the space the gardens are built on. Despite the mechanical simplicity, there is a lot of thought and care that has gone into representing the location well through the game. You can imagine the game in a place of honor on the Botanical Garden’s gift shop shelf, a thoroughly pleasant, and playable, souvenir to remind you of your visit.

Final Thoughts:

While not particularly unique, The Gardens is a beautiful thematic card game that is easy-going to learn and play. The components are pretty and good quality, and it presents a polished and aesthetically pleasing version of a well tread style of game.

Final Score: 3 Stars – Simple, solid, and playable.

Hits:
• Beautifully put together
• Theme is clearly thought out and well implemented
• Variations provide the option to add complexity to the game

Misses:
• Nothing new, innovative, or unique
• Rulebook organization leaves something to be desired