Renegade Game Studio | Arboretum | Card Game | Ages 8+ | 2-4 Players | 30 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

I'm happy to trumpet Everdell, in all its charm and glory, as the insurmountable favorite of my collection.

It’s part of why I like games like Railroad Ink and Avenue so much, as well — it gives you a nice sense of accomplishment at the end of the game. Since you’re able to give all of your attention to a single opponent, it plays much more like a puzzle that you have to solve. You must try to work out whether somebody is still holding the one, and if so, what is the point in holding onto your eight. You must weigh up the relative value of each card, unable to play some quickly enough whilst trying to not reveal too early what species you are trying to score.Throughout this game, the trade-off between what you want to lay down, what you need to keep in your hand, and how much you want to avoid tipping off your opponent/discarding anything useful to them can be brilliantly intense. In an unexpected turn of the rules, eights are rendered worthless in the hand when the one is held by the opposing player.

Typos happen, and yes, this one’s not great, but it doesn’t really impact my enjoyment of the game any and I’m sure they’ll fix it for the next printing. No card is every truly thrown away in Arboretum – it’s always available to those that want to dig for it. the hand pressure is exaggerated in Arboretum because you also want to hold cards to burn your opponents scoring opportunities, and the scoring and whatnot is more elaborate in Arboretum, but they give me an extremely similar vibe in play. People more familiar with the game can probably relate, but the games presents itself like a mellow romp.Whoever is nominated to be the scorer of the game – and therefore, the one who will hold the scoresheet – will read off the first tree on the scoring matrix.

But all this brilliant game design was interspersed with the feeling of putting down my dog every couple of rounds. As much as I enjoyed these crunchy decisions, it's a game I'd rather play at a convention, or online, where I can dehumanize the opponent and allow myself to be mean.For each color, the player(s) with the highest value of cards in hand of that color scores for a path of trees in her arboretum that begins and ends with that color; a path is orthogonally adjacent chain of cards with increasing values. I should note before I get into the review proper that when I was taking photographs for this I didn’t realise until I actually cleared the last card away that I was playing a two-player example with a three player deck. When you score a color, you score a “path” starting with a card of that color and ending with a card of that color. I find all of these questions really interesting and the game presents a lot of good, fun challenges.

If you hold a high card, you can nullify someone else's scoring, but you still score what you have of that type (usually 0). Because, if you remember, you need to discard cards on your turn, and players can pick up your discards. Cards in between the start and the end card can be any color, but they must be strictly increasing from start to end.Arboretum is a game that has players competing to build the most “sumptuous” arboretum – and by sumptuous, I mean the one which scores the most victory points! Even a random Nope is preferable to one where someone is sitting in wait, confident because of a high card or two that they can just switch off your scoring.