#18 Wild Gardens
This is a vibrant set collection/recipe fulfillment game where players are wandering forager chefs who travel from place to place gathering delicious ingredients in the wild and then cooking and sharing their skillfully prepared meals by having picnics with strangers that they meet along the way.
As silly as that theme sounds, Wild Gardens is great fun. Each player has a set of worker tokens with numbers on them. You place the worker token on your player board at one of three locations that represent the actions that you can take on your turn. You can forage for ingredients at one space, cook or serve your prepared food at another, and either gain a new ability by reading a book you borrowed from the library, or you can save a recipe from the market to prepare later.
Placing the token in a spot lets you perform the "either/or" base action in that spot plus any actions that you have added to that worker spot by reading library books. The number on the tokens are how much you must move your player pawn on the central board. This is important, because you will need to be in the right place to gather the ingredients that you want, or to cook and share your wonderful bounty.
The folks that you share your meals with are represented by cards and each person on a card likes certain kinds of foods, giving the person what they like wins you the card and scores you victory points. There's also a secondary victory point track in the form of jars that appear on some people cards. I think it represents folks that like your food so much, that they put some in a jar to take home. I'm not sure, but in our last game, collecting jars made a big difference for Julie and she won!
Wild Gardens is so cozy and funny and while it's theme is kind of nonsensical in that "I could definitely see this as the plot of an anime." kind of way, that is actually among its strengths. I love every thing about this charming vagabond chef's adventure board game!
I played this one last winter at a con. It was definitely cute and cozy, but the resources gathering was so tight, I found it frustrating. That said, we probably played it wrong. We sat down and just read and watched a video to try to learn it on the spot. I would give it another goal if someone could teach me again.
ReplyDeleteJulie and I just played this the other day, and I don't remember the resources feeling too tight. The base forage action always gets you two things and you can expand that. It might be worth a revisit.
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