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When I started this blog about gardening themed board games, I was surprised to find so many! Lots of games have beautiful flower designs and let you manage plants, grow gardens, and take care of allotments. Whether you're a gardener or just love nature, these games offer a fun mix of strategy and greenery.
Verdant by Sophie Jones
Verdant lets me enjoy gardening without the fear of wilting leaves. In this game, you're tasked with building a tableau of cards. Players will collect houseplants which they’ll need to water so they can pot them for points. As you play, you'll strategically place your houseplants in rooms with varying levels of sunlight to help them thrive.
Each turn, players choose a card—a room or a plant—from the centre and the token beneath it. These tokens, which can be room decorations or gardening tools, must be used wisely to help your plants thrive. The catch is, you can only choose from the ones available and you have to take the token it's paired with. Tokens can be of room decorations or gardening equipment to help your plants grow. Once you have your cards, players then build their tableau of rooms and plants. To score points they need to pot their plants by watering them and get as many room bonuses as possible. If you put a room type next to its matching plant you get extra points. Fill that room with a matching accessory and you score double.
One of the game's tricky aspects is the limitation on accessory storage—you can only hold one at a time. If your storage is full and you pick up an accessory you don't need, you'll have to place it immediately, which might disrupt your plans. To help, players can collect green thumb tokens. These tokens allow you to choose a token of your choice, or reset the cards, you can also spend them to water your plants.
Verdant is a peaceful game about houseplants, great for those who enjoy building tableaus, looking at beautiful cards, and watching things grow—no real-life green thumb needed.
Three Sisters by FavouriteFoe
At the risk of becoming a theme-bore, I love games set in nature. Gardens, oceans, birds forests, and farms. If it’s green themed, I’m in! And my reputation as a roll and write/flip and write fan is well documented. So when the twain shall meet, I am most definitely in my happy place.
And thus Three Sisters is one of my favourite games. Picking dice to grow crops (the triumvirate of beans, corn, and pumpkins aka the Three Sisters of agriculture!), harvest fruit, collect honey, and pick tools from my tricked out shed, this game is combo-tastic. In fact, the chaining effect is so great that one of the sheets contains a “notes” section so that you can keep track of your eleventy-billion conversions! Have spare pens at the ready as you will be crossing so many boxes off per game that the risk of pen emptying is real. But don’t let the bonus bonanza fool you. Whilst you might feel you are getting more than your five per day, making the best decisions to maximise those goodies is crunchier than a crinkle cut Cucumber!
And the solo mode is punishingly good. In fact, it’s my favourite way to play. Farmer Edith tears through my farmstead like an inky tornado. She crosses off plants and power tools with wild abandon! Not having to manage her own sheets is a bonus in and of itself, but her cruel disregard for my plans is addictive!
Three Sisters is one game in a series of brilliant “strategic roll and writes” which also includes the fantastic Fleet the Dice Game, French Quarter, and Motor City.
Scoville by Sean Franks
If you hear the word Scoville you might think of the scale for measuring the 'hotness' of peppers, but those in the know might also think about the board game released by TMG 10 years back.
It revolves around the fictional town of Scoville when they host their yearly chilli festival, up to six players take on the role of farmers who have attended for the day. Throughout the game you'll pass from the morning to the afternoon before closing time, purchasing stock from the farmer’s market, cooking up new recipes for the crowds and, most importantly, planting and breeding chilli peppers. This part of the game will appeal most to the green thumbed garden dwellers among us, especially if you’ve spent your time trying to get flowers to cross pollinate and breed.
The game begins with three primary types of peppers available to the players, over the course of the game more will be harvested from the field, bred by previously planted peppers. This enables you to collect newer peppers, the majority of which will be crossbreeds, larger peppers taking on the hues of their parents. These can then be planted into the field to enable further harvesting of newer peppers to take place, eventually leading up to the discovery of the legendary Phantom Ghost Peppers.
Even those who haven’t had the thrill of flower breeding during their garden efforts will still find one of the mechanics can satisfy any gardening needs - as your farmers move around the pepper field you will plant more peppers into the ground, but to do this you physically take the pepper meeple/token and push it into the slot on the board, sure there’s no messing around with soil but it gives you that feeling of putting seeds into the ground, just as simple as that.
Earth by Pete Bartlam
Years ago I owned a game called The Garden Game. It won a Design award for its’ beautiful artwork and tiny gardening tools and gathered Best Game of 1984 from British Toys and Hobbies. But beware, this was before we had dedicated bloggers who would actually play games and give you fair warning for it was dreadfully harsh! After many rounds of gently nurturing your plants they could all get wiped out by a sudden frost or storm leaving you with a tear-stained plot of bare earth!
Earth, on the other hand, is not only, also beautiful, but helps sustain your tableau plot of all things plant-like via: planting, composting, watering and growing to build an Eden of floral delight culminating in an exemplar of symbiotic relationships between terrain, climate and the bio-diversity that thrives there. Unlike The Garden Game, in Earth everyone will finish with a plot full of greenery and towering trees with a feeling of contentment and well-being.
Alright, someone will have actually “won” by producing the most efficient combinations of plant and animal co-existence but that doesn’t seem to matter when you survey your own garden of Earth-ly delights. When you have a game where the effective currency is soil and you don’t discard cards you compost them you know the green credentials are spot on.
This would be irrelevant, however, if Earth did not play well but, of course, it does. This is mainly due to the fact that everyone plays at the same time. While the active player gets to choose the one of four actions to perform, all the other players get to carry out a reduced version of the same action. There is little direct player interaction and you can just relax and watch your garden grow.
Planted by Dan Street-Phillips
The release of Wingspan in 2019 brought with it a huge shift of theme to the natural world. With its huge deck of bird cards with mechanisms based on the nature of the birds themselves and with each card telling you a number of bird facts so as you play you could also learn. Since then there have been a huge amount of games that do a similar thing and some designed by big name designers.
Well here comes Planted by the legend that is Phil Walker-Harding of Barenpark fame. Planted is a drafting game much in the vein 7 Wonders. Each player starts with a hand of cards of which there are three flavours. There are resources which will be used to grow your plants, tools which provide in-game powers and decorations to be scored at game end. Each turn you take a card and place it into your play area, but at any point you may trash a card to take a plant from a central market and place it in your play area. As you feed and water your plants they will grow, providing more and more points as the game goes on.
For those green fingered out there, the plants will be familiar, each with their latin and common names on the cards. They also are mechanically designed depending on whether they need more light or water or those which are harder to maintain offering more points if you look after them properly. All plants in my care seem to die but that doesn’t deter from my love of natural greenery and my plant whisperer friends instantly fell in love with it. It’s a peaceful game. It’s a calm experience but that doesn’t mean there aren’t meaningful decisions to make along the way. And I haven’t even mentioned the gorgeous resource tokens…what more do you want??
Power Plants by Callum Price
If you’ve got green thumbs, then you know growing things in the garden is one of the most rewarding and gratifying hobbies you can have! (Other than board gaming, of course.) You plant a seed and reap the benefits a few weeks later: be that aesthetics or produce. My choice of game for those with a green thumb is Power Plants. It’s a tile laying, area control game of reaping the benefits of tile adjacency for 2-5 players. You play as a collection of Sprites trying to control the most tiles in patches of magic plants placed by players. The magical element comes in with the plants’ abilities, with one tile’s placement being able to trigger every tile around them for minor abilities or trigger their own major ability!
Power Plants is definitely one for anyone who has any interest in horticulture, magic or clever tactics. It enables players to choose tile placements and trigger abilities that allow them to place their Sprites, add bonuses points to tiles, move or remove opposing Sprites and – in some cases – move whole tiles to new locations! It’s a tacticians’ and a gardeners’ playground of choice and planning. Whether you choose to Sprout or Grow (activate your places tile or the tiles around your tile) will determine the tactical advantage of your abilities. Go big with a major hitting ability? Or spice it up with several minor ones… for a short game, it really gets the brain whirring!
But why is this green thumbed little gem different to other plant based play? When setting up, players choose five of the available eight plants types and then choose whether to play a standard or more advanced game (based on plant abilities). This essentially gives players 16 variants of plant to utilise, allowing them to have a rich and vibrant garden of choice! Also, players score points in the end game based on the number of tiles controlled in a patch – as opposed to number of Sprites on the whole patch. There’s no skill in dumping all your Sprites on one flower. To really cash in, you’ve got to spread the seed of control wide and let it flourish in the end game by dominating the field. If you’re one for growing and controlling, go Power Plants!
Garden-themed board games offer a fun mix of variety and charm. Whether you’re growing houseplants in Verdant, running your own farm in Three Sisters, or building an ecosystem in Earth, each game gives you a satisfying blend of relaxation and strategy. With these games, you’ll watch your garden grow on the board and enjoy the joy of nurturing something from the ground up. So, why not add a touch of nature to your game nights? Any of these games is a great place to start. Who knows—your new gardening skills might even inspire you to grow something in real life. Happy gaming, and may your green thumb thrive, both on the table and in the garden!