Since you’re able to give all of your attention to a single opponent, it plays much more like a puzzle that you have to solve. When you’re drawing, you can take the top card of any discard pile (even your own) or the top card of the draw deck.

On each player’s turn they have a choice to pick up two cards from the top of any player’s discard pile or from the deck. The tactics of Arboretum fall somewhere between attempting to score as many points as you can and trying to stop your opponent from scoring any points. A delightful walk through a carefully cultivated garden, Arboretum nearly caused me to let down my guard as I fell captive to its beauty. When you play a card, it goes in front of you and has to be adjacent to another card you’ve already played. The analogy isn’t perfect, of course – Arboretum features a lot more luck than abstracts like Azul do; I’m just saying that you’ll be looking at the trees more than you’ll be interacting with the theme.Arboretum is a strategy card game for 2-4 players, aged 10 and up, that combines set collection, tile-laying and hand management while playing in about 25 minutes.

You need to be mindful of these pairings because (especially for large chains) you can’t afford to lose. Then, apart from the starting player, everyone else has one card placed face-up to represent their discard pile.You may draw cards from the draw pile, or you may take the top card from any player’s discard pile (including your own). 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. Make no mistake, this is the meanest game about trees that I’m currently aware of, and the dissonance between . Score one additional point for each card in the path if the path consists of at least four cards and they are all the same color. The thing that is compelling, to me, about Arboretum is that it’s an excellent game that asks you to agonize over each move you make.

You continually have to compromise between building your own hand / path and holding cards that will thwart your opponent(s); and your strategies have to adapt as new cards are revealed in every turn. In Arboretum, you create carefully planned paths for your visitors to walk as they take in the colorful explosion of buds and leaves.I just traded this away in last month’s math trade (on BGG) because it was too cut-throat for anyone I’d be playing it with.