Top 8 Plant Games
- Hey everyone. We're headed into my favorite time of year autumn which is not only a fantastic season but you can get apple cider, which is you know the bomb dot com. Does anyone say that anymore? I don't know, I just did. Anyway, this happens to be the time of year when folks are celebrating harvests and harvest festivals and things of that nature.
So it kind of got me thinking about plants. So today's top eight is going to be "My Eight Favorite Plant Games." The first on my list is Arboretum. I bring this one up a lot because I really really enjoy this game. In it you're an arborist planting trees and somehow, as peaceful as that sounds, you are fighting with the other people in the game who are planting trees as well.
It's got gorgeous art. It doesn't take terribly long to play but it is thinky because you have to not only plan out your routes, you've got to be very careful that other people aren't either trying to take the trees that you're laying down or don't have a trump card that won't allow you to score at the end of the game.
Next on the list is Cottage Garden which is part of a series of games that feature polyaminos which you're using to put together to make a beautiful garden while other people are trying to take the shapes that you want to make their own garden. It's part of a series of games.
So if you actually want to move into fall with it try Indian Summer. Then there's Morels, or Fungi if you get the German version which I actually recommend because the art is really gorgeous in that one. You play a mushroom harvester going into the forest and picking mushrooms and having a little bit of a fry up and kind of hoping that you got the right kind of mushrooms and the fry up doesn't go poorly for everyone.
Next I'm including Takenoko because you spend most of this game laying out the garden and growing bamboo. It's an adorable little game where a little panda is following your gardener around, actually eating the bamboo that you grow. And it's got 3D pieces so you can actually stack them up as you grow them which I think is very effective in being evocative of the growing part of the plant game.
Next on my list is Herbaceous which I love the art of. Now I do work for Pencil First. I do want to throw that out there as I say it, but it's a really fun card game in which you're growing herbs in your garden and you want to match them up as you harvest them.
It's got a really serene-looking color palette and the pictures themselves actually look just like the herbs if you found them in a garden that you grew. Bosk is up next and I like this one because you're playing through all the seasons of the year, finishing with competitive leaf falling.
How is that a thing? Well, it is. The board ends up gloriously colorful with all the different leaves on there and next time you rake you might actually think about this game. Topiary I feel like is a little bit of a hidden gem. It's got really adorable art and an abstract type play in which you're trying to get things lined up so you can see them from your character's perspective in a line.
Which doesn't seem like it would be that difficult but as the grid starts to get laid out you suddenly realize that your topiary shrub is actually a little bit bigger than someone else's and yeah there's a little bit of chaos that ensues. Last but not least is Photosynthesis which is another one of my favorite mean tree games.
In this one you're just trying to get your trees to reach out and touch the sunlight. And you're getting very angry at your neighbor as they put trees in front of yours so your tree can't grow anymore. It's got an interesting mechanic where the sunlight actually moves around the board so you have to think about it from every angle.
I think that's a little unique. So those are my top eight plant games. I'm actually really curious to see what you all put in the comments below as yours, mostly because I'd love to hear about more. I really enjoy plants anyhow. So it's a theme that brings me back to the table over and over again.
