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Arboretum is uncommonly pretty to look at – a card game of 10 suits, each a different colour; each a different, and beautifully illustrated, tree. But beware, there’s a beastly, back-stabbing, tough little game hiding under all those leaves and blossoms.
Each player has a hand of seven cards, and on your turn you take two cards (either from the discard piles or the draw pile), play one in front of you and discard another. The cards played in front of you form your arboretum, and are played to form a grid. During the game you try to create paths through the grid that start and end with the same suit – once the draw pile is depleted the game is over, and scores are tallied. Which is where the true nature of your tree-loving opponents is revealed.
Each suit is scored separately, and to be allowed to score it, you have to have more points in your hand than the other players. So all the while you’ve been playing magnolias, your opponents have been holding on to their magnolias to stop you being allowed to score it at the end. And should you try and shore up your win by holding on to the 8 in a given suit, you’d better hope no-one is concealing the 1; in a special rule, this reduces your 8 to a 0!
Of course this kind of chicanery comes at a price, because you really don’t want to clog up your hand with stuff you don’t need, and that puts a brake on things getting too nasty. And since all the cards are played or discarded, the only hidden info is each players starting hand, so you can have a fairly good idea of who’s holding what come the end.
Arboretum is a really interesting, pretty deep game in a small box, and deeply pretty it is too.
Yes! This is a game with some nasty surprises at the end, so players need to be aware of this going in. You can easily spend your game building a beautiful, high-scoring arboretum, only to have the other players, like wild boars on a rampage, bring it crashing down around your ears at the end.
Draw two cards, play one and discard one. However, there are many things to think about, so it could be slow with the wrong crowd.
Remembering what cards have come out will help, and there are up to ten suits of 8 cards each. But younger players could be allowed to peek at the discard piles if it helps level the playing field.
The first game will reveal the dark dell at the heart of this forest - someone will get burned, and they'll doubtless want a rematch to wreak their revenge.
2-4
Players
12+
Years
30
Mins
Joe says
On paper Arboretum looks like practically the perfect card game for me - set collection, a spatial element, beautifully illustrated cards. And it is good - some have said it feels like Lost Cities without the obtuse scoring. But I think I prefer the more straightforward gameplay of Lost Cities; the scoring in Arboretum can be pretty convoluted in itself. Perhaps I need to find a regular opponent and play a few more times before I pass judgement.