Of course, everyone must be concerned with scoring their own trees, but with seven cards in hand, there is seemingly always a slot available for holding a card that can prevent another player from scoring their mighty grove. When a game slithers under my skin so insidiously that losing to my Bearded Moon causes my eye-balls to steam up and my hands to slam down in a visual display of seething wrath, we have a keeper. When the deck is exhausted, players compare the cards that remain in their hands to determine who can score each colour.

Domestika on using python to do generative art and then realized the whole thing was in Portugese with subtitles. I appreciate games in which every decision feels important, but no one decision feels like the entire game hinges upon it. A four-player game may stretch past 30 minutes if anyone is prone to paralysis, but a 25-minute play is also not out of the question if folks are on the ball. People more familiar with the game can probably relate, but the games presents itself like a mellow romp.Arboretum is a game about minimizing your opponents score as much as it's about generating a score for yourself. I have found that I am spending a fairly good deal of time between my turns examining what my opponents have played (and hopefully remembering what they have drawn) so that I can try to mentally figure out which colors they are shooting for and what sort of total they have left in their hand. When you score a color, you find a path through your cards that begins and ends with that color (the cards in between don’t necessarily have to match), and each card along the path must have a value greater than the preceding card. There are bonuses to be had for each of these ways of creating paths, but they each come with the possibility of ruin. These paths are not required to travel in a straight line, although you can’t travel diagonally to create a path.

Even a random Nope is preferable to one where someone is sitting in wait, confident because of a high card or two that they can just switch off your scoring. So you not only have to win the game of building the best paths, you also have to win the game-within-a-game of keeping back enough points to be able to score your creation. If you see the 8 played, well, now you can play the 1 — it won’t help you much unless all of the other cards have been played. Arboretum, you create carefully planned paths for your visitors to walk as they take in the colorful explosion of buds and leaves.

Now we’ve got the preamble out of the way, let’s talk about why Arboretum is the one of the sharpest games in my collection – a game so sharp it can draw blood.

You know one of your opponents is collecting Oak cards, but you don’t want to get rid of anything else because that could hurt you!But you also have to hold the right cards in your hand to stop your opponent from making their path – and therein lies the difficulty.

You simply have to lay your trees (cards) on the table in front of you in such a way as to make a path, going from low numbers to high numbers. Arboretum is a strategic card game that challenges players to create the most beautiful path through the garden. You just have to hope that you’re still friends with your fellow players in five years and still living close enough to each other (and the trees) to make this possible.There are plenty of times that players will end up collectively using all cards of a color, so if you have even a tiny path, you’ll score it (since a 0 from all players’ hands is a tie).