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In Verdant you spend the game filling your house with plants, potting them, tending to them to increase their verdancy and adding other items to your home along the way. Did the Verdancy of happiness in our home increase while we played? Let’s dig in…
Preparing The Soil
The set up for Verdant is straight forward. You create a market section in the middle of the playing area. The market is where players can choose items from on their turn. Each player begins with some verdancy tokens (beautiful wooden green leaves) and 2 cards which you place straight into your home to start it off. One of each type of goal card is flipped over.
Planting The Seeds
Throughout the game, players build a 5x3 grid of cards to form their home. There are room cards and plant cards. The laying rules mean that the plant and room cards must be laid alternately throughout the grid so that you never have a room card next to another room card or a plant next to another plant.
On your turn, you choose from which column of the market you would like to take a card. You then collect the card (either a room or a plant) and 1 token. The tokens are either items that can be placed in your home on room cards or garden items that help add to your plants’ verdancy.
Once a plant has the required number of verdancy tokens on their card you trade them in for a pot. Once your plant is potted no more verdancy tokens can be placed on this plant. Different pots have different point values at the end of the game.
At game end there are bonuses for having one of each room colour and one of each plant type. There are also big points on offer based on the number of unique items you have, the more you have the more points you score.
If you can collect unique items and place them in rooms of matching colours then the points really start to stack up. A matching colour item in a room doubles the score for the plants around that room that also match in colour.
Climbing The Beanstalk
Verdant is very enjoyable to play. We found it quite a calm and relaxing game. It’s puzzle play really, working out where to place the cards and tokens to gain you the most points. The game continues until everyone has filled their 5x3 grid. This means that there is not an abrupt end to the game where you just needed time to place one more card. You will always finish your home/grid. The points you score just depend on how well you managed to fill it.
Coming from the creators of Cascadia and Calico, it’s inevitable that Verdant will be judged against them. I do prefer Cascadia, so if you can only choose one I would go for that. However, they’re very different games so if you have room in your collection for both then I’m sure you’d enjoy them both. I can’t decide if I like Calico more. Calico can be frustrating when you’ve been waiting for a tile to come out for the whole game and it never shows itself. A winner can be made in those last few goes based on luck alone. In Verdant however, you can constantly be scoring points by potting plants or collecting unique items. We certainly always had the option to collect all of the room colours and plant types, it just wasn’t always the best choice points wise to go for that. The theme in Calico appeals to me more and it did feel more exciting. That said, Verdant is a calm game to play and gives you that sense of achievement in the end, regardless of the winner.
Honestly, I was hoping for a little more from Verdant as Cascadia is one of my favourite games, but perhaps it’s unfair to keep comparing them.
I enjoy games like Floriferous and Sunset over Water for their calming game play. Verdant seems like a more complex and richer version of this type of game.
A House Full Of Plants
The gameplay is quite solitary. Interaction wise, you can choose to take cards that you know your opponent wants of course. However, you also have to place them into your house, so unless they are beneficial to you it would be counter-productive to do this very often.
The artwork was lovely and I will definitely be playing Verdant more. Once you know how to play, the game doesn’t take long. We found Verdant was a nice one to get out on a weekday evening when we didn’t have a lot of time. We enjoyed it when we wanted to relax whilst gaming with a light weight, puzzle, set collection type game.
That concludes our thoughts on Verdant. Do you agree? Let us know your thoughts and tag us on social media @zatugames. To buy Verdant today click here!
