Matthew Bailey“Alice’s Garden” has a bit of an unusual pedigree, being designed by Ikhwan Kwon, a Korean designer whom I must admit I have not had much experience with, and published by Lifestyle Board Games, a Russian-based publisher generally only focusing on Russia and surrounding countries. But for some reason, Alice’s Garden seems to have found its way West via a few UK-based retailers, and I am very much glad that it has.
Thematically based around the story of Alice in Wonderland, you and your fellow players are building a garden for the Queen in a game that is reminiscent of last year’s group stand-out, “Subway Squeeze”, but with enough differences that make “Alice’s Garden” worth adding to your collection.
Each player starts the game with their blank garden consisting of a six-by-eight grid with chessboard squares running up the middle.
On your turn, you choose a bag which denotes the shape of the tile and draw out as many tiles as there are players (plus an extra one on the first turn). Players then take turns drafting these tiles, with the one remaining being left on the table for future rounds. Immediately, I must say that this mechanic of being in control of the shape of the tile for that round is something I have not come across before and is really unique. During the course of the game, there were moments where I chose a shape that was convenient for me, and equally, towards the end of the game, I know full well that Jack chose a shape knowing that I was unable to fit it on my board when there were other shapes that I could.
Each of the shapes has a number of different icons on them that score in different ways:
- Mushrooms gain you eight points if you manage to get two or more in a column.
- Chess pieces get you five for every one that is on a chessboard square in the middle.
- Trees gain you a point for the largest distance between two of them on a row.
- Roses score points for how big each individual cluster is.
- Guards let you choose a single square if you put two of them next to each other.
From a gameplay point of view, the mixture of these works extremely well as you try to balance the need to have groups of roses, chess pieces in the middle, and keeping the distance and positioning of the mushrooms and trees as needed. Consistently in the game, I was having to choose between different options, but at the same time, never did I feel overwhelmed, and the boys equally found this enjoyable.
In the end, you lose points for any unlaid tile and also lose points for how many individual gaps you have, but it’s notable that gap size is irrelevant, meaning it is better to have one big block rather than lots of individual squares. I actually like this better than the individual squares way most games work, and it has a nice extra element of strategy.
From a production point of view, the game is good but nothing special. The velvet bags for the different pieces are lovely, and the rest of the game is made on medium-thick cardstock. I also appreciate the fact that the game is in a relatively small box, which is always an issue for those of us where space on the board game shelf/covered/room is ever increasingly limited.
We really liked “Alice’s Garden”, and this is definitely a tile-laying polyomino game that I fully intend to keep in my collection permanently and know will get played regularly. I will say that if you are not a fan of tile-laying games, there isn’t necessarily anything here that is going to convert you, but if you do like the genre, this is a very good example that does enough differently to make it worth a place in your collection.
