First Impressions of Vadoran Gardens

Time for a lovely stroll through the Vadoran Gardens. A beautiful place full of lustrous flora and playful fauna (or the other way round… it can be difficult to remember sometimes!) It looks a far cry from the desperate battles and grim adventures of the City of Kings and yet this cute little card game is based solidly in the same universe as that game, exploring one element of one culture within that greater world.

It’s a really neat approach to expanding on the success of a huge, thematic, game like City of Kings. Especially for a small Kickstarter based company with only that one game under its belt. It provides a hook into a, mechanically, very different game for all the fans of the first. Leveraging that fan base is essential for a small company like The City of Games. Not to mention being able to draw on all the theme and world building done by their previous title turns what could have been a fairly abstract game into something much more thematically interesting.

So… what’s all this about gardening?

Vadoran Gardens is about going for a walk in a garden. A pretty garden made up of square tiles filled with dirt flower beds, statue dotted ponds, animal filled lawns and… sand. Coarse, nasty sand, it gets everywhere! And doesn’t score you any points. Rather you wish to follow long meandering paths of particular terrain types and you do it through card selection mechanics similar to Kingdomino and placement mechanics reminiscent of Honshu.

You select a card from one column and your position in that column determines player order for the next round. Then you select one of your cards (you’ll have a hand of 4 after picking up) and add that to extend your path through the garden. Here though you must overlap some or all of the small subdivisions in the final column of your previous card, without extending the whole path too far from a straight line. Now, you don’t have to stick to a single type of terrain, you’ll just find it easier to score if you do, as each region of your garden scores for the number of spaces in it… if it has at least three features.

But there are various bonuses and collectibles available that will encourage you to vary your path. There are also restrictions to make it a more challenging puzzle than either Kingdomino or Honshu. The tiles have a fixed orientation, and each round only allows you to place certain types of tile, forcing you to manage the hand of cards you have to keep flexible. I’ve only had a single play but it was a wonderfully intriguing puzzle to have crammed into a little box!

 

This first impressions of Vadoran Gardens based on a demo at Airecon 2018.

Vadoran Gardens will be available soon.