Planted
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Planted

RRP: £30.00
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RRP £30.00
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In this game of nature & nurture, make your house beautiful by caring for your very own collection of houseplants! In this easy-to-learn board game, collect your favorite plants and they try to feed them every round with the right combination of light, water, and plant food. Planted features 42 varieties of popular and exotic houseplants, each with their own requirements to grow…
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Category Tags , , SKU ZBP-PLA01UK Availability 3+ in stock
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Awards

Rating

  • Artwork
  • Complexity
  • Replayability
  • Player Interaction
  • Component Quality

You Might Like

  • Easy to play and explain
  • Excellent tokens
  • Simple yet with meaningful choices

Might Not Like

  • Too simple for some
  • Some fiddly
  • Cards feel ‘rough’
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Description

In this game of nature & nurture, make your house beautiful by caring for your very own collection of houseplants! In this easy-to-learn board game, collect your favorite plants and they try to feed them every round with the right combination of light, water, and plant food.
Planted features 42 varieties of popular and exotic houseplants, each with their own requirements to grow. Discover various planting tools and decorations to help you raise beautiful, thriving plants, and score bonus points. The player, or plant parent, that ends up scoring the most points from growing their plants is declared the game’s biggest green thumb - and winner!

Some features:
Easy to learn mechanics for all ages strategy
Collect resource tokens to care for your nursery (water drop, sun chip, plant food, etc.)
Features 42 popular and various plant varieties for all levels of plant parents including the fiddle leaf fig, philodendron, ZZ plant, monstera, croton, and more!
Created by famed game designer Phil Walker-Harding

 

Green Fingers

Earlier this year I utilised my connections, which are many and varied, to obtain a copy of Planted on import. It was a supposed exclusive to an American superstore brand, but I wasn’t about to let international waters stop my pursuit of great games. Planted is by designer Phil Walker-Harding, a master at the light but deep game, as his previous games Barenpark, Sushi Go and Imohep suggest.

However the patient among you have been rewarded with a Uk release of Planted at an incredibly reasonable RRP too! Planted is a hand drafting resource management game of growing house plants, and it is pretty darn good.

Terra Firma

The first thing you will notice upon opening the box is the fresh earth soil smell, actually that’s a fib. But you will notice the quality of the components. Both good and ok. Firstly the resources are fantastic and all come in their own hessian bag. The standouts are the translucent plastic suns and water tokens which are gorgeous and fun to fiddle with. The wooden components are no joke either. With growth, plant food and green thumb tokens being screen printed too.

The player boards are… ok but they fold in a way that makes me worry they will tear/separate eventually. As for the cards, well I’m not sure. They simultaneously feel thick yet cheap. It might just be me but they feel grainy and I don’t like it and refuse to wear gardening gloves while playing!

House Plants

To start a round each player draws 6 resource cards and 2 item cards. In a similar fashion to Sushi Go you will select a card then pass the remaining cards to a player on the left or right depending on which round it is. You then repeat this with the 7 cards you have been given by the player on the other side.

Before the passing though, everyone resolves the card they have chosen. Resource cards are dead easy – you simply grab that amount of resources plus any bonus resources from previous chosen item cards. Item cards themselves are placed to the bottom left or right of your player board depending on their type.

Tools give you bonus resources when you choose other resource cards and decorations give you some scoring conditions to work on. For example a tool might reward you with a green thumb when you choose a double water resource card. Green thumbs can be used as a wild resource as long as you have two of them. A decoration might reward you with points for collecting certain types of plant.

Soiled

Players start the game with one plant card and can gain five more over the course of the game. Plants come in various types and can score various amounts of points should they be fed with the correct resources (sun, water and plant food). To gain another plant you can trade in your chosen resource or item card to pick a new plant from the central row. If more than one player does this they check the number on the card traded in and lowest number chooses first.

Plant cards have a mix of resource on the bottom and up to three ‘growth’ spaces down the left hand side. At the end of each of the four rounds you can feed each of your plants up to once, covering the lowest space with a growth token. You will gain the points under this token at the end of the game.

This means you spend the card drafting phase balancing grabbing the resources you need with being tempted by those handy item cards. There are only four rounds so you will have to more quick if you want to feed all your house plants. Resources that are left over at the end of the round can be traded in for points at a rate of two for one.

Pollenated

Planted comes together as a delightfully experience. The card drafting and resolution is done mostly simultaneously so there is hardly any down time and your choices are clear but require some thought. It is a perfect ‘first game’ for new players or younger players while still providing a huge amount of fun for more seasoned players.

I was super happy I imported Planted but I’m even happier than more people will now get a chance to experience this wonderful game. If you were being harsh you could say there is a level of fiddliness with the grabbing and spending of resources. I would counter that with the fact that this is a tactile game and there is a joy in spending what you got to achieve your ends.

Planted is not going to blow you away with new unique mechanisms, but it does what it does with confidence and aplomb! I highly recommend Planted whether you are new seedling to the hobby or a great oak tree!

 

Do you love plants but are overwhelmed with guilt because when you buy one, it does not survive more than one month in your care? Then get this game! We absolutely love plants and flowers but cannot keep one alive long enough to enjoy it fully even if we try really really hard, so when we found this board game we were so pleased and happy that we could not help but buying it straight away. This is a 2 to 5 players game, from Buffalo Games by Phil Walker-Harding beautifully illustrated by Hannah Bailey.

Let’s get down to business

Even just looking at the box transports you in a Garden Centre, you are immediately reminded of the musty smell in the greenhouses and just want to get the box open to look inside. It was a feast for the eyes as it packs very neatly and every piece is accurately made. Don’t even get us started on the little bags because they are simply too cute to handle. Each player has their individual mini-board and there is a board to display draw decks, discard decks and available plants. The artwork reminded me of a very old gardening book that my grandad used to own, I would spend hours to look at it as the illustrations were so pretty. The objective of the game is to fully grow as many plants as you can so you can earn victory points.

How to play

To be able to grow plants, players will need to collect resources, to do so they will pick 8 cards from the draw decks, keep one (with either the resource they want, a tool or decoration), swap the cards dealt in your hand with the other players, keep one, swap again and so on until the cards are finishes. Players can choose to acquire a new plant, to do so, they will have to shout “Nursery!” and discard one of the cards in their hand instead of keeping it. Once the cards in hand are finished you collect the resources acquired with the cards within that round (cutest little pieces ever!), then match the resources you have with the ones that your plant requires to grow and exchanged them for a propagation leaf that you can then deposit on your plant card. Once you cover all the numbers on the left of your plant card, your plant is fully grown and you’ve scored all the points available for that card. So yeah, you can see why we are getting so excited about this game… We can grow and keep plants alive this way!!!

Decorations and tool cards allow you to score extra point and collect extra resources.
For example:
– a tool card gains you 1 extra resource every time and you are allowed to keep as many tool cards as you wish;
– a decoration card gains you extra points based on what type of plants you own or how many plants you own that are fully grown.

Resources are: water, sun, plant food and green thumbs. Green thumbs can be exchanged in pairs for one of any resources of your choosing. You can also exchange leftover resources to acquire extra propagation to keep on your personal board for additional points. Finally, at the end of the game, you take out the nicest looking pad to score points. We absolutely adore a score book because we like to keep our scores and remind each other who is the champion of the house (don’t worry we are fully grown adults and only keep these things between ourselves… and now you know too). Replayability is quite high, as we already played several times but we haven’t gone through the whole deck of plants. Only fault, it might get a little repetitive over time and we wish we could have an expansion soon!

Final thoughts

This game is extremely relaxing, you can kind of try to ruin your opponent game, but if you focus on that too much you might miss important chances to collect the resources you need for your plants. It is also very enjoyable to play as you don’t have to wait for the other player to take their turn, you play at the same time at all stages of the game. So if you are like Roberta who is very impatient and constantly pokes Scott to hurry to take his turn, you’ll enjoy the change from turn based games. And if you are like Scott and think very long and carefully about your every move, you’ll enjoy not being hurried by the other player, who finally shuts up and enjoys a game peacefully. We said it over and over again, but the attention to detail in illustrations and pieces is simply amazing, boards and cards artwork alike are incredibly pretty and accurate. The pieces are insanely cute and well made, compared to other games that only use cardboard, completed and sorted in their own individual draw string little sacks. One last hurray for the score pad and the way the game packs in the box and we are done singing this game’s praises.

Zatu Score

Rating

  • Artwork
  • Complexity
  • Replayability
  • Player Interaction
  • Component Quality

You might like

  • Easy to play and explain
  • Excellent tokens
  • Simple yet with meaningful choices

Might not like

  • Too simple for some
  • Some fiddly
  • Cards feel rough