If you’ve ever felt bad about killing your houseplants, don’t. For a short span before I was a board game reviewer, I did admin for a college horticulture department, and saw what it takes to really keep plants alive: school leavers had to study for two years to fully qualify to work as gardeners or nursery technicians, while adults faced night courses over multiple years. Shit’s technical, is what I’m saying. Anyway – Sprout is an upcoming new board game that aims to capture the ups and downs of plant parenting with charming art, push-your-luck mechanics, and the lingering specter of death.
In Sprout, two to five players collect pot plants from a market of over 100 cards, each with its own demands for light, water, and food. To fulfil those needs you’ll flip over cards from a deck, but be careful how far you push your luck: flipping over three cards of the same resource kills one of your plants as you overwater it, overfeed it, or leave it to go crispy in the sun.
Don’t worry! You can bring your plants back to life with love, which is the last currency in the game, and also what you use to acquire new plants. This game clearly is made by someone who loves plants: each one has a beautiful, unique illustration, and is labelled with both its common and scientific names.
YouTubers The Board Game Garden give an overview of the game in the video below:
Sprout is currently up on Kickstarter until 5.40am PDT / 8.40am EDT / 1.40pm BST on July 21. It costs $39 (£30) plus shipping and any tariffs for the base game.
I haven’t tested a demo of Sprout, so I don’t know how well it plays, but on the surface it looks solid. My only concern would be that it’s a push your luck game, and that puts it into competition with Flip 7 and Flip 7 with a Vengeance – extremely cheap titles with firm positions in our guide to the best board games ever. They’re both fast playing party games, while this looks a lot more serene, so they’re playing to different tastes.
If your board game shelf is fighting for space with your rubber plants and peace lilies, why not share a verdant shelfy in the Wargamer Discord community?
Source: Wargamer
