Cottage Garden Review

Ah the Cottage Garden, is there anything that better conjures images of British country life? The sun shining down on a patchwork of flower beds and vegetable plots. The sound of birds singing, bees buzzing, and the soft purring from the pile of cats asleep in the wheelbarrow…

With Cottage Garden you at last get to do your best little old lady impression, pull on some Wellington boots and stretch those green fingers. But even those who don’t know their daisies from their dahlias, their clematis from their closhes, will get along just fine here. Read on, and you’ll soon be gardening like a pro.

Players: 1-4
Time: 45-60
Ages: 8+
Designer: Uwe Rosenberg
Artist: Andrea Boekhoff
Publisher: Blackrock Games, Edition Spielwiese, Happy Baobab, Pegasus Spiele, REBEL.pl, SD Games, Stronghold Games, White Goblin Games

Cottage Garden sits as both a sequel to the excellent 2 player game Patchwork and in many ways a prequel to the recent, epic, A Feast for Odin. Vikings liked nothing more than bit of gardening after a raid, you see, and much the same can be said of grandmas (you should definitely read my Patchwork review). It extends the wonderful tile fitting puzzle of patchwork to a 4 player game, without the vast boards and complexity of Catering for Odin. Let’s focus on the Patchwork comparison, as it is much closer.

Vegetable patch-work?

So, much like Patchwork, you are trying to fill your personal boards with Tetris shaped tiles that everyone collectively takes from a central market… A garden centre you might call it! Anyway, you’ll notice obvious differences immediately. For one, each player has two boards each and they’re splattered with flower pots and little glass flower covers cheerfully known as closhes. And each player has an L-shaped bench piece with a smattering of suspicious cubes on it. Things are quite different in the garden.

As anyone with a workbench knows, when something starts at one end of it, you want to see it moved to the other! Cottage Garden is thematic like that. On these little tracks you will be tracking points for, what else, flower pots and cloches of course! Haven’t you always wondered why rustic gardens are full of tastefully scattered flower pots? And surely we wouldn’t have wasted a word as epic as cloche on items not worth points? Yes, Cottage Garden knows what it’s doing.

So you’ll earn these points only when you completely fill a player board. On your turn you can either take a new flower bed section, or you can take a flowerpot, and add them to one of your boards. Immediately you have the central puzzle of Cottage Gardening: do you try and fill lots of space up at once with flowerbeds and therefore complete lots of boards, or do you take lots of flowerpots, making your gardens more valuable but costing you time?

This is strikingly similar to Patchwork, yet a very different puzzle at the same time. In Patchwork you also had an economy of time against points. But whereas I feel much more comfortable with the strategies of Patchwork, Cottage Garden remains as inscrutable as the scummy pond beside the hedge. But… In a good way.

It’s Gardening Time

Time here behaves very differently to Patchwork. Everyone has a limited number of turns, tracked by the relentless advancement of the gardener die, an intimidatingly large green dice that marches around the central market like the most bizarrely intimidating guard dog ever. It serves two purposes, it’s value shows you how many circuits of the board it has taken, with the 6th and final loop being an exciting sudden death round, and its position determines what choice of flowers you have access to.

You always pick from the row or column next to the gardener which gives you plenty of choice and a good guess at what you’ll have to work with next turn. The challenge is that you don’t refill a lane until there’s only one or fewer tiles in that row once the gardener arrives there. This garden centre metaphor is pretty good actually! The market slowly empties, refilling at disjointed moments that players can absolutely effect. Limiting your opponents choices later is totally worth doing.

But players still have options here. This garden centre accepts cats as payment for filling up your row, letting you grab the next two tiles from the supply which can be extremely useful when it’s a good fit. But cats are a precious commodity that can also be allowed to sleep peacefully in an empty spot of your garden, and better yet don’t take a turn to play. Unfortunately the only way to get more cats is to score enough points to raise a marker above the red line on your score track. Cats only respect those who bring in the points.

You do have a lot of score markers, each of which could potentially earn you some pussy, and you can move whichever you like when you score. But there is a big drive to get one marker to the end rather than multiple to the middle as the final space is worth a lot more points. Since scoring only moves a single marker of each colour, trying to get a marker in the end without wasting any points is a wonderfully intriguing little sub puzzle that really rewards careful planning!

Sudden Death!

I mentioned in passing the SUDDEN DEATH round. Which may have caught your attention. SUDDEN DEATH tends to do that. Which is good because you don’t want to get caught by surprise! The end of Cottage a Garden begins when the gardener dice starts its 6th loop of the garden and from then on players need to finish their remaining gardens as quickly as possible. Every turn from then on, they lose two points!

This means the final half of the game rapidly turns into another little puzzle of preparing for this final act. At the start of the 6th round, any plots with less than 2 flowerbed tiles on them are just discarded, so you can happily avoid the sudden death round if you want to. But if you choose to, you can push to complete an extra plot or two, and while you’ll lose some points doing so, so long as you’re quick you’ll still get more than you otherwise would have! Timing this just right can make the difference between winning and losing.

Cottage Garden does an excellent job of recreating the Patchwork experience for more than 2 players, while offering a different feeling game. Cottage Garden feels less intense, you have lots of little puzzles to solve in a cyclical process. Complete a garden, score some points, start the next one. Like through the turning of the years, your garden will bloom into life before starting over again next spring. It’s more relaxing, until the final round at least. The only issue really is that the 2 player game ends up being a bit long and repetitive, as you end up completing a huge number of gardens. The 3/4 player experience is much better.

So, in conclusion, if someone invites you over for a bit of Cottaging, definitely take them up on it.

Marc: Wait, Matt! You do know what Cottaging is right!? Google it.

Matt: what? I’m sure it’s noth- oh. Maybe check they mean Cottage Garden first.