Cottage Garden

Great polyomino game with two boards you are working on at the same time! Relaxing and competitive. The strategy comes in when and how you score your points. Really interesting mechanics for a short, beautiful experience.

Having never played a Uwe Rosenburg game or a polyomino game, I checked two off the list  at the same time in getting Cottage Garden. This is first in Uwe's family-weight polyomino trilogy and Cottage Garden, although often called the lightest of the trilogy, had the most appealing aesthetic. I don't garden, but I got this to play with my 7 yo daughter and she loves flowers and cats, so it was a no brainer. Components and artwork are stellar. I wasn't expecting much from the gameplay, but I was pleasantly surprised. It's clever, it does give you some thinky moments while still flowing easily, but really it's just so satisfying to play that it becomes a bit addictive. I've started playing it solo in the morning with my coffee just to wake up. Players compete to fill two garden grid boards, scoring on two separate tracks for pots and cloches as soon as one board is completely filled, you toss it aside and grab another empty plot and you do this for 6 rounds, whoever has the most points at the end wins. Winning doesn't really matter- it can feel like a bit of a race and also be relaxing at the same time. We stop to show each other when we've made a garden board that's particularly striking. We've made some kid friendly house rules that my daughter loves: cats count as cloches when scoring your garden plot and we toss the square beehive tiles into the nursery board mix and they are scored as either 1 or 2 wilds of your choice, cloche or pot and we do not subtract points during the 6th round. I am likely to pick at least another in the trilogy and probably more Uwe games in the future.