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

Product Information

So I only played this at two kind of intentionally; it’s got a reputation for being an incredibly mean (but fun) game, and that kind of intensity at higher player counts isn’t really for me. All of this is well and good, but the devious twist of the endgame is not on the table; it’s in the hand.

There is enough wiggle room in this game that it needn’t be so stressful, but the game makes its weight known for half an hour.

That’s determined by the player with the highest-value card or set of cards of that color still in hand. It was in print, the English one wasn’t (or isn’t, or won’t be, or something) and the German has vanishingly little impact on play. As you go along, you realize that all information is known in this game, if you’re paying attention.

And I fully agree with your assessment, with an added dose of irritation at memory and sequential maths. You can either try to build from the other end – using mostly high numbers – or you can try to build a nice core of middle numbers to start from which you can branch off with the extreme low or high numbers. I finally played this game last weekend, and it lives up to the buzz I’ve heard about how well it plays and how beautiful it looks. Arboretum is a strategic card game that challenges players to create the most beautiful path through the garden.Ideally, the endgame will hold one or two stunning reveals as the score swings like a blighted pendulum, leaving one supremely happy tree enthusiast standing tall.

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. This line, or path, can be made up of different plants, but two of the same species must bookend it. It seemed strange at first, but we found that people spent more time deciding which cards to take from the discard/draw piles rather than playing their cards. There’s nothing in the box except a deck of cards and a rule book, which is really more of a pamphlet.Three, only the person with the highest value of a single tree in their hand at the end of the game scores that particular type of tree. You can draw from other's discard pile, you don't want others to draw from your discard pile, you can prevent others from scoring, and you don't want others to stop you from scoring. Building an arboretum is part luck of the draw and part wild scavenging through everyone else’s garden waste bin for their unwanted offcuts.