The Last Garden: New to Kickstarter

In the second edition of my New To Kickstarter blog series I had the chance to look at a game called The Last Garden and speak to its designer/publisher Chris Rowlands from One thousand XP!

The premise of this game is that in a post apocalyptic world a lone survivor (The Queen) finds robots and tasks them to build a garden out of pretty gems, with all her flowers now dead, to bring colour back into the world as she remembers from her childhood.

This is a very unique take on the 'world is over' theme.

The Last Garden - Gameplay

The Last Garden takes worker placement and crosses it with a betting mechanic. You have a set of 'Robotanists' that are your workers and you must place these in different areas to gain effects.

The areas are as follows:

• The Garden- Robotanists deployed directly into the Garden will gain favour based on the number of gems in their area.
• The Workshop- Robotanists deployed into the workshop will gain favour based on how many gems are in the sectors they are helping to assemble
• The Mines- Robotanists deployed into the mines will gain favour based on how prevalent the colour of gem they are retrieving is within the garden.
• The Lab- Robotanists may also be sent to the Laboratory in order to gain one-time program boosts. These boosts allow you to augment cards you play in the future for even more powerful effects. Once each player's workers have been placed its the end of that round, and you will now gain favour. All workers return home and you begin the scoring phase.

The gems in the garden do not reset so the game is ever evolving and keeping an eye on what gems are left are key to staying one step ahead. The Kickstarter page has a very good video of the game being played so check it out to make more sense of whats above.

The game seems very easy to learn and the artwork is very good. I did have a minor problem with the dice not fitting the theme and actually wrote this in the Kickstarter page. The designer took this on board and now the dice are a very cool robot-metal colour - I love KS for letting us get our ideas across.

Hack-Packs

This idea is based on when a certain level of funding is reached a Stretch goal will be unlocked that will allow game owners to create there own rules. This is a very interesting idea and Chris had this to say about it:

"When we started One Thousand XP we always wanted to inspire imagination and to encourage creativity. We came up with Hack Packs for that reason. We're hoping that there are people out there that have always been curious about game design that will use these promotional components to make something awesome. It's something that really motivates us."

For an indie game that appeared out of nowhere, this has already done very well and is well on its way to unlocking more stretch goals. Its neat twist on a post-apocalyptic world, its art and the hack-packs make it one that's worth checking out at least.

Currently The Last Garden has received $16,494 from its Kickstarter campaign, with 455 people backing the game. According to this page the game will take between 30-45 minutes to play can take between two and four players!

Credit to One Thousand XP for the images!