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Wild Gardens is such a surprisingly delightful board game filled with whimsy strategy! Rose Gauntlet has done it again with beautiful artwork, fun and interesting gameplay and a theme that I can’t help but love each time I play! For players looking for a fun, beautiful and whimsical strategy game, this is the game for you!
OVERALL THEME
Wild Gardens is all about foraging, cooking and serving up yummy dishes to new friends. With so much detail put into the ingredients, dishes and characters, I’m whisked away into a garden rich gaming world.
ARTWORK
From the dishes you create, to the guests you are serving…the artwork is full of whimsy, diversity and bright vibrant colors and characters. There’s a giant foraging board that is double-sided (great for replayability). One side has bright colorful flowers for a more spring/summer season feel and the other side has beautiful fall leaves and colors. There are also tiny little library books with each ingredient stamped on the top. These books are placed on a library board with a sleeping cat in the middle of it all. Rose Gauntlet never disappoints with the art style and quality of games they publish!
OVERVIEW OF GAMEPLAY
The gameplay in Wild Gardens is very simple, yet very strategic. Players will go on two trips during their Wild Garden gaming adventure and each trip will last three days. Points are scored primarily by cooking recipes and serving those recipes to guests. There are several locations to randomly pick from, with varying “beginning of each day in player order” effects. Players take 3 simple steps during their turn:
Step 1: Place an Action Token – this step is highly strategic as each action token placed will determine what skills are activated and what future action tokens are left.
Step 2: Move your Forager – where the forager lands will effect what skills can be taken. Players must take the exact number of spaces, move in the direction of the arrows on the board and cannot count or land on another player’s forager.
Step 3: Activate Your Skills – players can forage, cook recipes, serve recipes, gain new skills from the library or reserve recipes/guest cards. While it may seem like there are a lot of skills to choose from, the skills themselves are very straightforward and not overly complicated to understand. There is a learning curve with understanding how the library works, but it’s a skill that I didn’t use a lot of during my playthroughs of Wild Garden so the rules for the library didn’t get overly complicated for me.
After players have placed all their action tokens, then the rest action must be taken. This signifies the end of a day. Each player must sacrifice one of their action tokens to gain an end of day location bonus. This action token cannot be used for the rest of the current trip. Players will reset the rest of their action tokens and a new first player begins the next day. When players reach the third day of their first trip, everything is done the same as previous end of days. After the location bonuses have been taken by all players, then all action tokens are given back to players, the library skills, recipe cards and guest cards are removed and new ones drawn. The foraging tokens are also all removed from the board, reshuffled and replaced on the board, and any library books that are still checked out are returned to the library. A new location card is drawn and a new trip is ready to be taken! At the end of the third day of the second trip, the game ends.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I have played Wild Gardens a few times now and have loved it more and more with each new playthrough. In fact, I’m trying to get some friends together to play it again as I’m typing this review! I have played Wild Gardens with players of all skill levels and everyone has thoroughly enjoyed it. This is an absolutely delightful game! It has solid strategy, a lot of accessibility for all types of players, beautiful components and artwork and the gameplay is fairly quick and easy. The 60-90 minutes playtime goes by so quickly because Wild Gardens has such a sweet lovely theme and interesting gameplay. In fact, it can almost seem to go by too fast, leaving me wanting more time to make more moves! I highly recommend this game to any board game enthusiast. Wild Gardens does not disappoint!
