PLAYED FOR YOU

Zen Garden

Water, Trees, Grass and ROck in a Garden

All players place landscape tile to form a garden. In Zen Garden you randomly draw a secret pattern tile and must form this pattern twice in the garden with two different types of landscape. In your turn you place one tile, orthogonally adjacent to at least one tile in the garden or you replace a lantern tile (joker) with a landscape tile. If you are first to reveal your pattern you score 5 points and bonuses and stop to play. All others score 4 points and lose one point for each round the take without revealing their pattern. When all have revealed or nobody has points anymore you win with most points. 

In Rock garden you place landscape tiles and control such tiles with your markers, there are no randomly drawn patterns. You first place a landscape tile as in the Zen Garden game and then you can do two actions, choosing from 1) place a landscape tile or 2) play a pattern tile (back side of a landscape tile) and place a marker – the marked tile must be in a group of five or less, the landscape type of pattern and landscape tile must be the same and the number on the pattern tile must equal the number of tiles in the group – or 3) score a pattern tile from your hand, the pattern must contain at least one tile with your marker. Then you draw tiles in relation to the number of actions you took.

Zen Garden has an interesting scoring mechanism putting you the dilemma of „do I have enough points to reveal first or should I wait for more bonuses?“. Simple enough for beginners, albeit somewhat unbalanced due to the random assignation of patterns; Rock Garden is interesting enough for more experienced players.

Players: 2-4

Age: 10+

Time: 30+

Designer: H. Jean Vanaise, Coleman Charlton

Artist: Jared Blando, Morgan Dontanville, Pete Fenlon

Price: ca. 12 Euro

Publisher: Mayfair Games 2013

Web: www.mayfairgames.com

Genre: Tile placement

Users: For families

Version: en

Rules: en

In-game text: nein

Comments:

Two entirely different games

In Zen Garden patterns are more easily recognized and therefore easier to block; Pattern assignation is randomly and therefore sometimes unbalanced

Compares to:

Carcassonne and other placement games with scoring of part of the display for patterns

Other editions:

Currently none

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 0

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0