It’s a big name for a very little game. Now, the name is a bit of a lie, you do have 18 total cards in the box, but that allows you to set-up play and then immediately play again as you’ll only ever use two cards. Orchard – A 9 Card Solitaire Game is one that I just picked up recently and I’ve really enjoyed my plays thus far. You can see some about when I picked it up in my latest Point of Order article.

Orchard – A 9 Card Solitaire Game

This is a pretty simple game. In it you are playing down cards to overlap them. The goal is to match the tree types, apple, plum and pear. As you stack the cards you put dice out on the matching parts. You start with one and then can move up to 10 if you have four cards with the same tree lined up correctly. The tricky part comes from the fact that you can only have two mismatched trees in the cards you play down. So how much you can overlap the cards can be really limited. And the cards have different layouts of apple, plum, and pear trees on them, but always two of each. In the end you are seeing how high a score you can get.

What Doesn’t Work

Honestly, this is a very simple game. My only negative for my copy of the game was that it didn’t come with a rule book. Now, this game originally was a print and play, so finding rules on Board Game Geek was extremely easy. But it’d have been nice to have the rules in the box like they were supposed to be. Granted, I’m not going to go to the publisher, like I said the rules were easy to find and I’ll print them off and be good.

What Works

I could actually start to use my – What I Look For In A Solo Game – article to determine if a game works or not. And I might later on, but I want to keep what I normally do as well. I really like that this game is small. It has a tiny box, I think 18 cards, 15 dice, and two bad apple tokens. And because you are overlapping the cards the nine cards won’t even take out that much space. I could see putting this in my pocket if I knew I was going to be waiting somewhere at a table for a while.

The card mechanic is also really interesting. The first few times I played the game I didn’t do extremely well, 22, 24, and 32 points. But then I got 42 points because there are a few different ways you can overlap the cards. Obviously the higher you stack the better because you go from 1 to 3 points and then 6 followed by 10. So if you can get a 10, that’s a lot of points. If you can manage to pull one or two off, that is a ton of your points there. However, you aren’t as likely to have all 15 dice out.

I also like that Orchard – A 9 Card Solitaire Game gives you a wide variety in your points. The one downside I have with A Gentle Rain, besides the amount of room it takes up, is that the points range from 0 to 8. If you get all 8 discs put out, it’s a win, really, but it gives you that score. Here you can score very few points, 22 to a lot of points 42, that I’ve done thus far. I like the feeling of scoring a lot of points. It feels better to have gotten 42 as compared to 22 than it does with 7 compared to 4 in A Gentle Rain.

Solo Game Score

As I write more of these “What I Look For” articles, I’m going to start adding in this section. I want to highlight how I use what I wrote about and to show you what matters to me to help you make an informed decision.

The three small box solo game criteria are, length, ease of play, space. Thinking about it, I want some interesting decision making as well, so I’m adding that as a criteria for a small game.

1. Game Length – 5/5
   I played 8 games in a sitting one evening. That was about 1.5 hours, so just over 10 minutes per game. And some of that was learning the game. The game is extremely fast and it’s an easy to sit down and play.
2. Ease of Play – 5/5
   This is a very simple game to play. It’s very easy to get to the table, it’s easy to shuffle up those 18 cards, take half of them and play the game.
3. Space – 4.5/5
   A very small game with a very small footprint. Like I was saying, this is one that I could have with me if I was waiting somewhere. You do need a little table space, but not that much. It could even work on an airplane tray.
4. Decision Making Space – 4.5/5
   This actually has some really good decisions in it. Yes, there is a lot of luck as to what 9 cards you have in your deck and what order they come out in. But there is a lot of decisions to make as you play out the cards.

What Is Orchard – A 9 Card Solitaire Game For?

It’s going to sound obvious, but solo gamers. This is not a game that I see getting people into solo gaming. The theme isn’t there. A Gentle Rain, I think, is more inviting, but this one is a ton of fun. This is for that solo gamer who wants to have more small games to take place. Or more small solo games to pull out in an evening. It falls into that category of game that someone would get who likes the Oniverse games like Onirim.

Final Thoughts

This is a fun small box solo game. I don’t know that I place it above A Gentle Rain in my favorites in that genre. A Gentle Rain is just so relaxing to play that it feels different. Orchard – A 9 Card Solitaire Game definitely has a little bit more going on to it. But your choices are limited in what you can do. Two cards and matching stuff, so it doesn’t offer too many brain burning choices. Definitely a small solo game that I’m really glad I picked up.

My Grade: B+
Gamer Grade: C
Casual Grade: B+

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