Botanik (English/French version)

Botanik is a two player tabletop game from Space Cowboys. It has a truly unique style, being a steampunk style game where you have to connect your machine to help grow plants. This is done by placing your tiles into your machine and linking the source machine to as many plants as possible, which can lead to some weird and wonderful combinations and layouts that change every time.

What’s In The Box?

The box artwork for this game is so detailed and beautiful that it’s no surprise this care and attention to detail carries through to all of the box’s contents. The box itself is a great travel size and everything is packed well inside without wasting any space. You get two sets of instructions, one in French and one in English, a small board that covers the tiles and the Mecha pawn, which all fit inside their areas within the box.

The instruction guide for Botanik is only eight pages, including the front and back, so no reading this for hours before you can even start setting up. They’re clear and fairly easy to follow, though some parts of the game are easier to understand when you actually get into the game. A large amount is taken up by photos of the game and pieces involved, including some of the wrong ways to build your machine, which helps a lot.

One of the things that stands out is the Mecha pawn itself, it’s got a nice weight to it and it’s one of those things that could have been a small token or tile but having a sculpted piece feels nice to hold and gives it more weight when passing between the players. The tiles themselves have a great level of detail, with two source tiles so each player can start their machine alongside the pieces that are placed within each player’s turn. Another extra detail in the design is the way they made the board look like a journal when it’s folded in half.

There are many elements within this game that make it really nice to look at and hold, you can see more detail and new things each time you look at the cards. It feels like one of those games where it’s a bit of a shame to put it away in the box and it would look good for a display.

Setting Up

Setup for this game is fast and easy so you can get into the game itself quickly. After laying the small board down so that each player has a row of five tile spaces facing them you take a source card and place it on your side of the board. The Mecha pawn is placed on one player’s side and the tiles are all shuffled and put into two separate piles face down.

Taking the first five tiles, these are placed on the central area of the board with one on each of the spaces. The two piles of tiles are placed face down at one end of the board with a space large enough for another line of tiles to fit between them and the board, this will be the ‘arrival area’ where the tiles are placed when drawn.

How Do You Play It?

To me this game falls into the category of games that are easier to learn as you play rather than reading the instructions. Once you get going it becomes quicker and is simple to play, even though it may not feel like it reading the instructions.

Once Botanik is set up the player with the Mecha pawn picks three tiles and places them face up into that gap you left between the piles and the board, this is called the ‘arrival zone’. The players take it in turns, starting with the player who has the Mecha pawn, and pick one of these pieces to place onto the board. To place a piece on the board it has to be a match for the those in the centre of that row, either by the shape or type of tile, or by the colour, a bit like in Uno. Once all three have been placed then the next player gets the pawn and draws three tiles.

To move tiles off the board onto you machine area you have to make it so that they don’t match the tile in the central row. This is done by putting one of the tiles from the arrival zone on top of those piles, again matching by colour, shape or style. If the tiles on either side don’t match with the new central one then that pile gets removed off the board and given to the player on that side. This means that you can either dislodge your own side or that of your opponent.

Once the piece is taken off the board you add it to your machine, though this time you don’t have to match the colour or style, with pipes having to join to each other. There can’t be any areas where a pipe just stops because it’s hit a side of another tile, it has to create a continuous pipe or lead off the machine area to be connected to in the future. You can place the blank side of a tile without a pipe against an existing blank edge to be used later on in the machine, but this does risk you not being able to use it if it doesn’t get connected. There are also plants in all of the colours, these are used to end a pipe and can only have a pipe coming in from the one side.

There is one type of card that has an extra rule, the Mecha-Botanist has to be immediately switched with a tile in the centre of the board if you dislodge it within your pile of tiles. This then has the same rules as with a normal tile placement. This is the tile that took a bit more getting used to and realising how to use this rule, but after a few goes it became easy

How Do You Win?

Botanik ends when someone completes their machine, there’s no open pipe ends without a plant, and the points are counted for each player.

Points are counted in two ways. The first is the amount of flowers in your machine, the most obvious being in the plant tiles you place to complete an area of pipe. It’s worth keeping an eye on the flowers you have in the other parts of the machine, they pop up on some of the pipes, as these are included in the final score.

There’s also the extra points gained with having more than three of one colour connected to each other. These can mean that it ends up with some surprise wins if you haven’t been keeping an eye on the opponent’s machine as well as your own.

Overall Thoughts

This is a fun game, it’s quick to learn and can get quite fast paced and competitive depending on the players involved. You can play in a way that concentrates on your own score, work on keeping your opponent from getting anything or messing up what your opponent gets if they’re awkward tiles. The fact that you can dislodge your opponent’s tiles the same time as your own can really throw your own game off if you forget or don’t pay attention to what they need. Sometimes the piles can get quite high on the board so you forget what’s underneath.

This is the kind of game that you could take to a friend’s house, or just as easily play with family and have children and older people involved as it’s quick to master and the rounds go quickly. Creating patterns and working out how to make the machine work while keeping space for future tiles means players do have to be a certain age to understand this but the tile pictures and colours add to the charm of the game. It could even work as a team game if you wanted to give that a go.

As this game relies on a lot of randomisation from the tiles, both in the initial setup and on each turn, it’s got an unlimited amount of replayability in that sense. It also makes you feel like you could do better, like you just missed out and work on new strategies for the next game if you lose. Even if you win you see things that the other player did that you realise you should focus on more for better results so it can turn into an evening of multiple games and time disappears.

It’s definitely joining my pile of games for regular games nights as well as for quiet nights in when you need a two player game that truly works for two people rather than it being a game that works better with more people.