Cottage Garden
| Cottage Garden | |
|---|---|
| Game data | |
| author | Uwe Rosenberg |
| graphic | Andrea Boekhoff |
| publishing company | Edition playground, Pegasus games |
| Publishing year | 2016 |
| Art | Board game |
| Teammates | 1 to 4 |
| Duration | 40 minutes |
| Age | from 8 years
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| Awards | |
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Cottage Garden is a board game by the German game designer Uwe Rosenberg . The game for one to four players, ages eight and up, was published as the first project by Edition Spielwiese in Berlin in October 2016 and by Pegasus Spiele in December of the same year . Further editions appeared in France and the Netherlands in the same year. In 2017 the game was nominated for Graf Ludo , Game Graphics of the Year, along with several other games . Like other games by Uwe Rosenberg, such as Patchwork or Ein Fest für Odin , the game is based on a puzzle mechanism in which individual puzzle pieces of different shapes ( polyominos ) have to be placed on a base and thus earn points.
Theme and equipment
The game treats thematically building a cottage garden , English "cottage garden". The players take on the role of hobby gardeners and plant their beds with various flower tiles that they take from the general display. These parts are so-called polyominos , i.e. areas that consist of several connected squares. The aim of the game is to get as many victory points as possible, which result from the number of flower pots and planting bells on the completed beds .
In addition to the game instructions, the game material consists of:
- a game board printed on both sides (the "nursery") with a grid of 4 by 4 fields
- 38 puzzle pieces (flower tiles)
- 9 panels as "flower beds" with one light and one dark side each and with a grid of 5 by 5 fields
- a green six-sided die (the "gardener")
- a large round cardboard disc with a parasol ("placeholder")
- 30 round cardboard discs with a cat motif
- 16 round cardboard discs with a flower pot motif
- two cardboard discs with one or two beehives
- four plant tables for the ratings (one per player)
- 12 small orange dice as scoring stones, 3 per player for the flower pot scoring
- 12 light blue small cubes as scoring stones, 3 per player for the planting bell scoring
- a wheelbarrow
Style of play
In the Cottage Garden game , players try to get the highest possible score in the form of victory points by planting flower beds with flower tiles. The winner is the player who has the most victory points at the end of the game.
Preparations
At the beginning of the game, the game board with the nursery is placed in the middle of the game, whereby the side of the game board depends on the number of players. The fields of the nursery are filled up with the flower tiles at random, the remaining 20 tiles are placed in random order in a queue next to the game board, the wheelbarrow is placed at one end. Then the green die is placed on the starting field on the edge of the field as the “gardener” with the number “1” (for 1-2 players with the “2”).
The players each receive a planting table with a scoring track, on whose starting field three orange and light blue dice are placed as counting stones. Then each player receives two flower beds at random, one being turned to the light side and the other to the dark side. In addition, each player receives two cardboard discs with a cat motif. Place the parasol, the remaining cat chips, the flower pots, the beehives and an open flower bed next to the game board.
Course of the game
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Phases per turn
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Cottage Garden is played in rounds, with players going clockwise through four phases per turn.
In the first phase, the filling phase, the fields in the rows or columns of the “nursery” in front of which the gardener's cube is placed (the “gardener's row”) are checked. When playing with four people, there are also diagonal rows of gardeners that must be checked. If only one or none of the four fields contains a flower tile, it is completely filled with flower tiles from the queue. Take the tile that is in front of the wheelbarrow and place it on the empty space that is closest to the gardener. This is repeated until the row is filled, the wheelbarrow is pulled each time. If only one or two spaces are free in the gardener row, this is only filled when the player surrenders his own cat tile.
In the planting phase, the player chooses a flower tile from the gardener's row and places it on one of his flower beds. The flower plates can be turned and turned so that they fit on the bed. The tiles must not overlap when displayed or protrude over the edge of a flower bed, and they must not cover round cardboard disks with "cats" or "flower pots" while printed flower pots and plant bells can be covered. Once placed, the flower tiles stay where they are and cannot be moved in subsequent turns. To try out the flower tiles, they can be taken out of the nursery at any time, even if another player's turn, and placed on the bed as a test. The parasol is then placed on the corresponding field of the nursery as a placeholder. If no flower tile from the gardener's row fits or if the player does not want to take any of the tiles, he can take a flower pot tile instead and place it on his bed or place one or more cats from his supply on an empty space in the flower bed.
After the planting phase, fully planted flower beds can be scored (scoring phase), i.e. beds on which there are no more free fields with the exception of printed flower pots and planting bells. The evaluation takes place on the basis of the flower pots and plant bells on the bed and is settled on the "plant table". The flower pots are worth one and the planting bells two points. For the flower pot scoring, the flower pots on the bed are counted (printed and as tiles) and one of the orange wooden cubes is moved forward by the corresponding number. Then the visible plant bells are counted and scored with one of the light blue wooden cubes on the plant bell bar. If the red line with the mice is crossed when placing an orange or light blue wooden cube, the player receives a cat tile that he can put in his own supply or use directly. If a player owns more than two cat tiles, he must either use or discard the surplus cats. If a player brings the last of his three wooden cubes of one color from the starting space to the scoring track, he receives a flower pot from the supply, which must be used immediately. If the second bed is complete through the use of the flower pot or a cat, this will also be billed. If one of the wooden dice reaches 20 on the scoring track, further points expire and cannot be transferred to another dice. The player who first brings his first wooden cube to the finish receives the tile with the 2 beehives and the second player who succeeds receives the tile with the individual beehive. Each of the beehives is counted as one victory point in the final accounts. After scoring, all flower pot and cat tiles are returned to the supply and the flower tiles are placed at the end of the flower line. The billed bed is turned over and placed in the middle of the table, the player receives the bed that has been laid out in the middle of the table as a new bed of his own.
In the last phase, the gardener phase, the gardener die is moved one space on the edge of the board in the direction of the arrow. If he reaches the target space, the number on the gardener's die is immediately increased by 1. If the gardener's cube is turned to “6”, the final round begins.
Final phase and final scoring
At the beginning of the final round, the players must give up all flower beds with a maximum of two flower tiles. After that, the players must continue to play until all the remaining flower beds have been completed. Before each turn, the players still in the game lose two points each, which are deducted from the respective scoring rows using the wooden dice. If all wooden cubes are on fields 0, 1 and 20 of the point scale, a wooden cube on field 20 must be moved back one field, the player loses 5 or 6 points. Completed flower beds are removed from the game and no longer replaced. If the red line on the scoring scale is exceeded by a set of wooden cubes, nothing happens, if the cubes cross the red line again after evaluating a bed when moving forward, the player receives another cat tile and can use it again immediately.
The game ends when all flower beds are removed from the game. Then all the players' points are added up, with the orange wooden cubes receiving 1 to 15 points and the light blue wooden cubes 2 to 14 points, depending on their position on the scale, and all cubes on the target field receiving 20 points. Each beehive is worth one point, unused cat tiles do not earn you any points. The player with the highest number of points wins; in the event of a tie, the number of beehives decides on the better placement.
Development and reception
Cottage Garden was developed by German game designer Uwe Rosenberg in 2016 as the first project for Edition Spielwiese , which was founded on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Spielwiese game café in Berlin. It was published for the International Game Days (SPIEL) in Essen in October 2016. In December of the same year, the game was also published by Pegasus Spiele and was published in France by Blackrock Games and in the Netherlands by White Goblin Games.
The game is similar to the Patchwork game, also developed by Uwe Rosenberg, in that fields are puzzled with pieces in both games. Rosenberg himself also draws parallels to the game Kupferkessel Co. by Günter Burkhardt from 2001 and Ubongo by Grzegorz Rejchtman from 2006. Through the puzzle mechanism, he also draws parallels to Ein Fest für Odin , which also contains one, and explains:
“At A Feast for Odin, I had two approaches to the puzzle mechanism. I kept the one for Odin simple and isolated the complicated approach with cost and time when I worked out the game that later became patchwork. Patchwork turned out to be a much bigger success than I expected. So I continued to think about how I could work out the pure puzzle feeling, because patchwork feels a bit like an economy game. Cottage Garden was born out of these considerations. "
The illustrations come from Andrea Boekhoff , who also illustrated Das Zepter von Zavandor (2004) by Jens Drögemüller and Saboteur (2004) by Fréderic Moyersoen . In 2017 the game was included on the nomination list for Graf Ludo , a prize for the best game graphics of the year.
In the BoardGameGeek game database , Cottage Garden had an average rating of 7.2 (out of 10) with more than 1200 reviews (as of January 2017).
supporting documents
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Game instructions Cottage Garden at Edition Spielwiese; accessed on February 1, 2017.
- ↑ Versions of Cottage Garden in the board game database BoardGameGeek (English); accessed on February 1, 2017.
- ↑ a b c Michael Weber: Uwe Rosenberg on a festival for Odin and Cottage Garden. Interview with Uwe Rosenberg on reich-der-spiele.de, October 1, 2016; accessed on February 2, 2017.
- ↑ Graf Ludo 2017 - The selection list ( memento of the original from October 1, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; Retrieved June 26, 2017.
- ↑ Ratings & Comments for Cottage Garden in the BoardGameGeek game database ; accessed on February 1, 2017.
Web links
- Game instructions Cottage Garden at Edition Spielwiese
- Cottage Garden at Edition Spielwiese
- Cottage Garden in the Luding games database
- Cottage Garden in the games database BoardGameGeek (English)