It’s time to make our Community Garden thrive! Players will use Gardeners to gather resources like water and compost and then will play cards ranging from dill to strawberries to butternut squash. The player who has scored the most points through growing their garden and collecting Harvest cards wins the game. But this is a community garden, so you’ll be helping your fellow players acquire the resources they need to make their plots prosper as well.
Community Garden is a fun, strategic, easy-to-learn, beautiful game that as one player put it, "has tons of joyful moments."
"A gorgeous and charming game of set collection plus worker placement... A delight!" - Mx. Tiffany Leigh, board game show host
"Community Garden is such a feel-good game. With a quick setup, easy teach, and cute theme, no doubt it's one of those games that will make it to the table pretty often." - BoardGameGeek reviewer
"Community Garden offers a good amount of strategy in a very small box size. The rule book is really well written and easy to follow which makes it an easy teach to both experienced and new gamers alike... Community Garden is a good game at a good price." - The Tabletop Times
"We Played Community Garden with 2 players and it played really well at that player count as it does at larger player counts. The game is really easy to learn and has some good strategies with the worker placement and the resource management aspects. The game comes in a small box but the game play is big." - Bert's Tabletop Games
Stats
-
Age: 12 and up
- Player count: 2 - 4 players
- Time: 45 - 60 minutes
- Game Genres: Worker placement, card drafting, set collection
What comes in the box?
- 1 Garden Board
- 4 Player Boards
- 16 Gardeners
- 100 Resource Tokens
- 4 60-Point Markers
- 48 Garden Cards
- 23 Harvest Cards
- 28 Tool Cards
- 4 Point Trackers
- 1 First Player Marker
- 1 Rulebook
- 1 Round Card
- 1 Round Marker
Game Overview
Community Garden is a competitive but friendly game. The only way to interact with other players is by helping them. Yet, the goal is still to end the game with the most points!
Community Garden is played over 7 rounds, in which players are aiming to collect resources - water, compost, trowels, and seedlings - in order to play Garden cards, such as oregano, collard greens, and shishito pepper.
On their turn, players will place one Gardener on the board to gain resources, gain Garden cards, or to use Tool cards. Once a Gardener is placed, it remains in that space for the rest of the round.
Sometimes, however, you may want to share a space that one or more other players are already in. In that case, you'll need to spend Green Thumb tokens to join players in busy spaces. There are a number of ways to gain Green Thumbs, including taking a little break on the bench - which allows you to collect two Green Thumbs.
Green Thumbs also have another benefit: they often allow you to activate Tool cards. Each Tool card has a unique effect, and when you place a Gardener on a tool, you use the effect listed on the card. This might allow you to gain a number of resources at once, take an extra turn, or create other fun combination of effects.
Players will also be able to use their Gardeners to draw cards from the Garden beds, strategically adding new Garden Cards to their hand that will give them points and helpful bonuses.
On each player's turn, after they've placed a gardener, they'll be able to spend resources they've collected to plant (play) Garden cards from their hand. They'll then place the Garden card they've just played in collections in front of them.
And we can't forget harvesting! Any time a player completes a pair of the same color of Garden cards (such as two brown Garden cards) or a row of all the colors (brown, pink, silver, and red), they will draw bonus Harvest cards. Each Harvest card is randomly worth anywhere from 1 to 3 points, and players will add them to their final score after the 7th round, which is the end of the game.
The player who has scored the most points through planting Garden cards and collecting Harvest cards, wins the game!
Credits and Thanks
Game Design: Brian Van Slyke.
Publisher: The TESA Collective.
Board, Box, and Back of Card Art: James Firnhaber.
Special thanks to: Our playtesters and our community gardening experts we consulted.