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All photos on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4. There’s three basic conceits to the game that turn this game into a brain burner that’s much more intense than what its botanical veneer lets on at first.
As the scoring proceeds, each player reveals the contents of their hand, putting every individual botanical dream to the test. If you wanna win, you’re going to have to work very hard to actively hurt your opponent, and all your work may prove to have been worthless by the end of the game. This is a highly-interactive mean game, which is something I like, very different from games like Wingspan where you better just play it individually in your own houses without talking and the experience is the same.I've played this over and over with different group sizes, but find it works best at two players, and we tend to exclude the same trees each time. What they will score is a orthogonal path of cards in their arboretum which begins and ends with the target color. Each player looks at the remaining cards in their hand and reveals how many Blue Spruce cards they have. My reaction to Arboretum and other equally inciteful choices is totally different to the kind of anger levelled at a game that is simply poor.
Add to that the fact that you also want to actively deny your opponents the right to score, if you can, and you have a very intriguing, strategic, addictive game that’s perfect for almost any group. I didn’t think too much of it, I’ve played mean games in the past but haven’t found anything outrageous.
Playing a card involves placing it down in front of you, adjacent to another of your cards, unless of course it’s your first turn. Even if you don’t have any Blue Spruce in your arboretum, if you win the right to score it that means the other players…well, don’t. You may draw a card, look at it, and then draw another from any location, even one you’ve already drawn from. Each turn, the current player picks two cards from the draw pile, or any discard pile around the game. Opportunities are never lost, but the cost of seizing them soon escalates out of sensible consideration.
For example, they say it's well designed, the art work is lovely, and the gameplay is highly competitive. Each of those leaves, from each of your opponents, forms a drift that may contain treasures that you want for yourself.Now we’ve got the preamble out of the way, let’s talk about why Arboretum is the one of the sharpest games in my collection – a game so sharp it can draw blood. One additional rule is if a player has a 1 in their hand at the end, the value of the 8 in someone’s hand of that same species is treated as 0. Arboretum is a strategic card game that challenges players to create the most beautiful path through the garden. Choosing the correct cards and placing them in the most efficient orientation will score you the most points at the end of the game.
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