We’re excited to share with you a preview of Verdant, coming to Kickstarter September 14th!
Get ready for a charming, houseplant filled puzzle in this new game from Flatout Games!
This post is sponsored by Flatout Games. All opinions are 100% my own.
Verdant launches on Kickstarter September 14th.
Click here to be taken to their Kickstarter sign up page.
What is Verdant?
Verdant is a spatial card game for 1 to 4 players where you’ll attempt to create the coziest home filled with houseplants and other unique objects.
How Do You Play Verdant?
On each turn, players will select an adjacent combination of a card and a token from the market and play them into their home in front of them. A players home consists of a 5 card wide by 3 cards tall grid of alternating plant and room cards.
Each side of the room card features a different type of lighting condition. Each plant has unique lighting requirements. Players will work to place plants next to rooms which help fulfill their “verdancy requirement” so they can “complete” the plant and add a Plant Pot Token for bonus points. Whenever a Plant or a Room Card is placed into your home, you check to see if a match between the lighting condition on the Plant Card and the Room Card have been made. If so, then a verdancy token is added to the plant. Once the total number of verdancy tokens on the plant matches the required verdancy, you may place a Plant Pot Token on that card.
Playing and Using Items
After selecting and playing your card into your home, you may then choose to place or use the item token that you collected. Items may be placed into any open room in your home. Items placed into rooms that are the same color will increase the rooms scoring potential.
If you collected Nature Item tokens with your card, you can use them to add verdancy to the plants in your home. These are one time use tokens and must be discarded after use. Each Nature Item provides a player with a different way to add verdancy:
Fertilizer: Add 3 verdancy to 1 plant.
Hand Trowel: Add 1 verdancy to up to 3 plants
Watering Can: Add 1 verdancy to up to 3 plants surrounding a single room.
Players can store a single item token on their storage card for later use.
After a player has completed the above, the market is refilled and a Green Thumb token is added to the remaining card in the column the player selected their card. (Example: if you choose the room card, the above plant card will receive one Green Thumb.) Green Thumbs can be used to take special actions.
End of Game
The game continues until players have completed their 5×3 grid. Then scores are tallied with players earning points for:
-Completed Plants
-Bonus Plant Pot Tokens
-Verdancy on incomplete plants (total number of verdancy tokens divided by 2)
-Room Bonuses (1 point for each adjacent plant of matching type. 2 points if room has matching item token)
-Furniture and pet tokens (an increasing score based on the number of unique items in the home)
-Plant Collector Bonuses (having 1 of each of the 5 different plant types)
-Decorator Bonuses (having 1 of each of the 5 different room types)
The player with the most points wins!
What do we think?
Verdant is an absolutely lovely game. The beautiful artwork and unique theme invite you in where you meet a surprising level of challenge and brain burning decisions within a game that feels like it’s giving you a hug the entire time.
I find that Verdant has all the qualities to delight both the new and experienced gamer.
The experienced gamer will love how many decisions they’ll have to mull over. I appreciate how from the very start of the game you have to both think about your long term strategy while also leaving room for flexibility. There are many different paths to victory. Perhaps you want to have a room strategy where you attempt to collect only a few colors and pair them with their like colored plants, thereby earning bonus points galore. Or maybe you want to collect unique items to earn the highest point value so you work to collect cards based on the items they come with. Still again you can achieve victory by having a home filled with high value plants so you work hard to meet their verdancy requirement and pot them.
These are but just a few of the ways you can chart your path to victory! Everyone can employ different strategies and find themselves battling it out for the win.
Regardless of the path you choose, you’ll want to decide pretty early on. There’s not much room to wiggle once your home is half built. This need to strategize and work towards a goal from the get-go made the puzzle of Verdant so very fun for us! It’s addicting. I kept wanting to play again and again to solve it quicker or in a new way.
For the new player, Verdant is quite straight forward!
As much as it can be a crunchy math game, mechanically it is incredibly simple to learn and play. Verdant is the type of game that I love to reach for when introducing players to modern games. It is easily taught and quickly grasped. On top of that, there is a wonderful tactile element to the game. Drawing tokens out of a bag, adding wooden leaves to your plants, repotting fulfilled cards, and of course getting to examine all of the beautiful art. Verdant provides an immersive experience that I can see many players falling in love with.
Theme
Theme is always an important element in a game to me. Verdant absolutely nails it. Not only is this game unique but it’s so perfectly woven into the mechanics that it makes the game even easier to learn. This is important because the game itself isn’t as easy as one might think upon first glance. There is a LOT to think over throughout each game. Lots of math, planning, and reevaluating. Because the theme is so strong, I find that it makes what could have been intimidating for some or boring in a themeless context inviting and immersive.
It makes sense that you need to consider where you place your plants in the house. Not all plants need the same light so you’ll need to provide different conditions for each plant. If those conditions aren’t met, then it won’t thrive.
To earn extra actions on your turn, you’ll need to gather green thumbs. If you have a green thumb, it makes sense that you might be more likely to coax success out of a plant that may be in a less than ideal environment.
I also love the imagery the room colors and items bring up. The cards may be flat on the table, but when playing them I imagine creating a beautiful home filled with a feast of colors, trinkets, and textures for the eyes to explore.
Components
It is important to note that the copy we played was a preview copy. The final version could appear different than what we were given. That being said, I was extremely happy with the components we saw. The wooden verdant tokens and cardboard pieces were all well made. The cards were vibrant with easy to read iconography no matter where you sat at the table. And of course Beth Sobel’s art steals the show.
How does it play with two?
We found that Verdant played wonderfully at two. It is easily scaled down for two players by adjusting the number of victory point pots available for the game. The biggest difference in our two player games compared to our 3 and 4 player games is the number of cards you see. Overall, our enjoyment of the game was not impacted by player count.
This is a game I see myself selecting for a relaxing date night together.
The Family Variant
In preparing this Kickstarter preview, we were also able to play the still-in-the-works family variant for Verdant.
Here is a brief rundown of the family variant changes:
The game is played as normal with the following exceptions:
Lighting conditions and verdancy requirements on plants are ignored. Green Thumb tokens are not used. Nurture Action tiles no longer have unique abilities.
When a player drafts a Nurture Action tile, it may be used to complete one of the plants. You may choose any plant pot as the victory points of the different pots no longer applies. Each completed plant is worth 5 points at the end of the game regardless of the points printed on the card.
(Please keep in mind that these are a work in progress and may appear different in the final copy of Verdant)
We feel the family variant perfectly strips back difficult math elements of the game to make Verdant inviting and simple for new players (young or old) that may struggle or become overwhelmed by the amount of things to keep track of in the standard game. It does all this without making the game too easy. There’s still plenty to work through!
We also enjoyed that the game was less fiddly without the green thumbs, verdant tokens, or needing specific pots. This is great when playing with younger kids.
We still found the variant to have a nice challenge associated with it and could even see us choosing to play the game with the family variant rules if, for instance, it was at the end of a long day and we didn’t want too much brain burn.
That being said, we greatly love that this is just a variant rather than the standard rules. It’s wonderful to include, but the game shines best with the standard rules. Because the standard game isn’t as “family friendly” due to all the changing mental math and future planning, including the family variant instantly makes the game appealing for an even wider audience to enjoy.
Summary
Verdant finds that cozy middle ground where both the new and experienced gamer will find something to love. The theme is welcoming with gorgeous artwork throughout. While easy to learn, Verdant offers players a multitude of strategies to explore and is sure to delight those that love a healthy dose of number crunching in a game. In many ways Verdant feels like a puzzle you can solve a new way each time which kept us coming back for more.
Thanks to the family variant, it is easy to adjust the difficulty of the game to allow for a wider age range of players to enjoy making this an excellent choice for families!
We highly recommend checking out Verdant and give it two enthusiastic green thumbs up.
Verdant launches on Kickstarter September 14th!
Click here for more information about the Kickstarter and how you can back the game.
Game Info:
Title: Verdant
1-4 Players Ages 10+
Designers: Molly Johnson,Robert Melvin, Aaron Mesburne, Kevin Russ, Shawn Stankewich
Artist: Beth Sobel
Publisher: Flatout Games
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