How To Play Grove?

Grove can be played in two different ways, so let’s talk about the basic way first. Grove is a 9 card game with an 18 card deck. You use half of the cards and you are trying to layer cards so that you match like trees. When you layer cards you bump up the value of the tree being scored in that spot by one. So if I layer a lemon tree with one lemon and a lemon tree with two lemons, I place a die with the three face up. Then if I layer again with a two lemon, I go up to five. The goal is to get the highest total possible.

However, Grove offers two things to not make a match. Firstly, you can layer glades over anything. So empty spots on a card. Over a tree of some time, you can do that and now put another tree down there. Or over a die, you can do that, the die stays, and you can grow that tree type again. Or there is a squirrel, it allows you to break a match completely, say oranges onto a lemon, but it kills that spot. And that spot as well as any adjacent scores -1 point.

Then you just add up the pips on the dice and that is your score. How you score doesn’t change with challenge mode, but challenge mode changes what you target to score.

Challenge Mode

The other way to play the game is a challenge mode. On the backs of each card is a scoring challenge. So you pick two out of the deck of unused cards at random and you try and score those. That can vary from two times the score of oranges, or have all the limes in play, or get three lemons next to each other.

Each challenge gives you points as well as has a specific point total on the card. So maybe you get two times your orange score and get three lemons or any fruit next to each other. The double your oranges is 44 points and the three fruit adjacent is, let’s say, 28, so you’d need to score 72 points to win the game.

What Doesn’t Work?

The challenges are hard, and while they tried to balance it, I think that sometimes you just flip a challenge card, especially like get all 15 dice into play, and that’s not worth it. It’s a lot of effort, you keep the score of the dice you have in play low, and you don’t get enough points to offset the low dice or the target score. Now, being hard isn’t the issue here, it is the balance.

The other question is how long does the game play work? Especially the base game, I don’t know that it is better than Orchard. If you are just looking at layering cards, I think that Orchard offers the same puzzle, without the glades and squirrel, just rotten apples, that creates a more interesting game play.

What Works?

Like Orchard, the game play is very fast for Grove. I have played it over 100 times in the month of January, I’ll probably play it over 400 times throughout the year. Why, I use it as a palate cleanse when I have a few minutes between meetings at work. Or over lunch as I want to keep my brain engaged and busy, but I don’t want to work through lunch. And it doesn’t take up much room.

I also really enjoy the challenges. Yes, some of them I feel like are less balanced. But my negative of how long the game play will stay interesting is really taken care of by the challenges. It gives you that extra puzzle to work towards. Yes, some might not be worth trying to score, but depending on the cards you get, it might be. It really depends and I think that it works really well for the game.

Who Is It For?

This is for the solo gamer or the gamer who is looking for that palate cleansing game. I use it after a long day or like I said at work between meetings. It is the same area that I use Orchard for. And I have two copies of Orchard, one for work and one for home, and I’ll likely do the same with Grove. But if you are like me and like small solo games, Orchard is going to be a good option.

Final Thoughts on Grove

Grove, I was worried when I backed it on Kickstarter. My concern were the challenges, was it going to make the game too complex. How was scoring going to work and would it take a simple experience and drive the complexity up. What works so well with Orchard is how clean and simple it is. Grove, in all fairness, does make you think more, especially with the challenges.

But the challenges don’t add in complexity to the game. It makes some choices harder, but the game is still as simple to get the table. And I really appreciate the twist now on the game. Like I said, if I play base game, I will play Orchard. It offers more satisfying game play for me, but with the challenges, Grove offers more puzzle to it than Orchard.

My Grade: A-
Gamer Grade: A-
Casual Grade: B-

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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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