Vadoran Gardens

RRP: £16.99
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Attention Acolytes! Old V’Sheel, the High Priestess of the Vadoran Gardens is retiring, and maybe one of you will take her place. Go out into the gardens, study her lessons in Life, Nature, and Wisdom to prove yourself worthy of such an honor. Vadoran Gardens is a tile placement card game, set in The City of Kings universe. Players take the role of young Vadoran acolytes train…
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Value For Money

Rating

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

You Might Like

  • Easy to understand rules
  • Vibrant artwork
  • No words, no reading!
  • Geometric puzzle solving

Might Not Like

  • No ways to hinder other players
  • A small game with quick gameplay
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Description

Attention Acolytes! Old V'Sheel, the High Priestess of the Vadoran Gardens is retiring, and maybe one of you will take her place. Go out into the gardens, study her lessons in Life, Nature, and Wisdom to prove yourself worthy of such an honor.

Vadoran Gardens is a tile placement card game, set in The City of Kings universe. Players take the role of young Vadoran acolytes training to be priests in the Cyrrus Order and must complete tasks whilst exploring the Temple Gardens.

One game of the Vadoran Gardens consists of ten rounds, and in each round your acolyte tries to learn a valuable Vadoran lesson. Each player, in order, selects a Pathway card from the pool and places it on their personal Garden Pathway, representing your journey through the Temple Gardens,and your quest for knowledge! Match the symbols on your Pathway card to your current lesson whilst focussing on feeding the animals, studying ancient relics and maintaining the gardens to succeed!

 

Vadoran Gardens Feature

Build your own puzzle of pathways through the Vadoran Gardens. On your journey, you will be tasked with collecting relics, cultivating plants, and feeding animals. Compete against your rivals to win the title of High Priestess of Vadoran Gardens. To be a worthy ruler however, players must study the lessons of Life, Nature and Wisdom.

Vadoran Gardens is another highly rated game from designer Frank West and The City of Games publishers. A game of Vadoran Gardens is pretty quick, usually taking around 20 minutes. Although with the maximum amount of 4 players, you can expect a game to last up to 40 minutes.

Vadoran Gardens is based within the same vibrant universe as the other fantastic titles from The City of Games publishers. If you are familiar with other titles from The City of Games, Vadoran Gardens is most comparable to The Isle of Cats. Both games focus on geometric placement puzzles with a very wholesome narrative based in the beauty of nature.

Vadoran Gardens Body 1

Vadoran Gardens – The Game

Vadoran Gardens is essentially a picture-based puzzle game. Pathway cards are the focal element of the game. Consisting of grass, water, sand, and soil tiles, these pathway cards will form your journey. Place cards together to create your unique pathway through the gardens.

As you build pathways, you will earn points based on how many of the same type of pathways connect. Whilst forming your pathways, you will also be working towards specific achievements which are chosen randomly at the start of a game. Within your pathways you may find animals, relics, or plants. Achievement cards may ask players to find 3 different animals within one pathway or perhaps find 4 of the same plants.

This allows players to form various strategies. As some players may work towards achievement cards, others could focus on building vast pathways. This also adds to Vadoran Garden’s great replay-ability!

A random Lesson card will be revealed each round. Players must play pathway cards that match the lesson of the round. For example, if the lesson card of the round is a wisdom lesson, then players must place a card on their pathway which contains a wisdom symbol.
After ten rounds of each player placing a pathway card, it’s time to total the final scores.

Components

Although packed within a small box, Vadoran Gardens its bursting with high-quality components. The attention to detail is flawless throughout every aspect of the game. The small animal tokens are especially precious!

As we can expect from The City of Games publishers, the art is exquisite and very charming. The peaceful, almost tranquil vibe of the game is certainly enhanced through its visuals.

Another important note is that the rulebook is very thorough. Detailed explanations/ examples of set up specifics and victory score totalling is provided. This really helps players get up to speed with the various depths of gameplay. If players desire further explanations, then there are various groups and pages that are always happy to help. Many of these are listed on The City of Games official website.

Vadoran Gardens Body 2

Final Thoughts

Vadoran Gardens is quick, simple, yet great. Definitely an ideal warm-up game for a board game night. If you’re itching to play a game, but you have less than an hour to spare then Vadoran Gardens is an ideal choice.

There is certainly great replay-ability to Vadoran Gardens. You may find yourself playing multiple games of Vadoran Gardens again and again. Players often find that the 10 rounds of each game simply are not enough.

The premise of the game is super simple, and yet the puzzle solving of the path placement is so in depth and well designed! That’s why Vadoran Gardens is a highly recommendable game for board gamers of all ages and experience.

Have you played VADORAN GARDENS? It’s a cute looking cube box from City of Games – the publisher of the Isle of Cats and Race to the Raft. There’s a wee creature on it (a Vadoran pup) who is trying to join the prestigious Cyrrus Order, and a very pretty font.

Well, that’s as far as the cute and cuddly goes. This game is a card patching brain burner and it drives me mad in the best possible way! And now, thanks to a 2023 rules refresh, I can go crazy without inflicting the card induced coo-coo on my husband!

I won’t go into the ins and outs of the multiplayer experience here. But to summarise, over 10 rounds you are trying to create a horizontally connected pathways in grass, sand, soil, and water through an enchanted garden.

The garden cards contain different terrain types and animal, statue and flower task icons that will score points based on the scoring objectives in play for the game. There are also some lost items which you can collect and exchange for points at end game if you still have the required icons visible. Oh and if that wasn’t enough, connected areas will score 1 point per square if they have at least 3 matching task icons in it. Turn order for picking cards from the offer row in the next round is determined by which card you draft from the active row in the current round (prioritising from left to right). Placing cards is done simultaneously once every player has their hand of cards fully stocked.

The rub is that each new card can only be placed on top of the last card you placed, and may only cover the 1,2, or 3 squares in the rightmost column of that previous card. If that wasn’t enough, the maximum height of your path is 5 squares and the drafting row from the turn before has a lesson card which either (a) restricts what card from your hand can be placed down in your current turn (usually by specifying a symbol type) or (b) dictates in what orientation the card you lay must be placed. The standard rule is that cards cannot be played upside down or on their side (i.e. the symbols have to be at the top). But some lesson cards literally flip this rule on its head!

This game hurts my brain so much. I feel like it shouldn’t given its diminutive size and filler-length play time. But it does. And that’s excellent!

Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves!

In solo mode, I am battling against my Vadoran sister. It basically follows the 2P set up (and you can also implement the advanced rule set when playing alone). Difficulty level is set by how many Black Vadoran meeples are in play in the game which allow her to claim achievements (3,4,5, or insane 7) before I can get there and claim my meagre 1 goal per type! My sister always gets the highest point available achievement when she has satisfied the criteria. This is the main way she scores, but she will also get points (1,2,3 or insane 5) for each grass, soil or water square in my path that are not part of a connected, scoring group, and any lost items we don’t return (by having matching visible icons in my path at end game).

Her turns are prescribed – each round her card of choice in the drafting row will be the one that (a) matches the symbol on the lesson card and (b) has the fewest symbols in total – if there’s a tie, she favours the one furthest left. And in a wee twist, her card are just overlapped vertically into a column from top to bottom with each new card overlapping the bottom row of the one played previously.

Final Thoughts

This game burns my brain. Spatially and strategically, Vadoran Gardens is a lot trickier than it looks! Cute but deadly to my spatially challenged ND grey matter! Being able to see the upcoming lesson theoretically helps with planning picking and placing but also causes panic as I realise how after playing my very first card I could have messed everything up! Haha

And in solo mode, it’s no less synapse sizzling. I am very pleased that I don’t have to think for or build my sister’s path – it’s just draft, stack, and cross check the achievements as icons are multiplying in her connected squares of matching territory type. If I had to think about placement optimisation for her as well, it might just melt my mind!

Zatu Score

Rating

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

You might like

  • Easy to understand rules
  • Vibrant artwork
  • No words, no reading!
  • Geometric puzzle solving

Might not like

  • No ways to hinder other players
  • A small game with quick gameplay