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stone garden. To this end, you pick Garden tiles from a common display of twelve tiles. Buying such a tile costs you 0, 1 or 2 coins; this is a refinement of the frequently adopted price rule from Dirk Henn’s Showmanager. You may place the tile on any space of your Garden board, provided all tiles there are connected. Each tile consists of three motifs (walk- ways, floors, and decor) in different forms. In the end, the player with the most beau- tiful garden wins; beauty is defined here by completed circular paths or certain stipulated landscapes and decors. Select- ing a tile is anything but trivial, since you need to weigh the scoring criteria you want to focus on. Six of them are given in the introductory version; the number can be increased to eleven. With this, every- body can choose the level of complexity that he prefers. Zen Garden is an elegant, consistently composed game. -cc/sbw
Ravensburger
In Push, the “Push your luck” principle has been realized in its purest form and without frills, but without jumping on the bandwagon of a traditional idea. On your turn, you draw one card after anoth- er and then stop at some point because you want to or you have to. Using the cards you draw, you may form up to three columns – similar to Sid Sackson’s Can’t Stop, where you can activate three piec- es. Identical colors or numbers may not appear more than once in a column. If you stop soon enough, you choose all the cards from one of the three columns; two of the other players take the other cards.
If you push too far (this happens more than once in a while only if you play too riskily), you don’t get any of the cards you have laid out and might also lose some of your own cards to your opponents. Twelve cards show a color die; if you have drawn such a card, you now have to roll the die and lose all cards of the rolled color that you have already collected. But instead of drawing cards, you may alternatively secure your cards of one color. The high luck factor might not be to everybody’s taste. But the breakneck pace is impres- sive in any case. -cc/sbw
Rio Grande (Mandoo Games)
As in Cottage Garden, the gardener figure in Queenz moving around the main board determines from where you can pick up to three orchid blossoms. If you want to take more than one, you may collect only those without bees. Alternatively, you can choose one of the available pentominoes and cover it completely with Orchid to- kens from your supply and/or with your own beehives (initially, you have three of these). Groups of several blossoms in the same color – also over adjacent pentom- inoes – score victory points. And if you have scored for all five colors by the end of the game, you earn a bonus.
A single bee on a blossom entitles you to immediately swap a tile from the dis- play with one from your own supply. Once one beekeeper places his fifth pentomino, he triggers the end of the game. Each bee adjacent to a beehive now gives you extra points; if you have placed them cleverly, this can make up a major part of your
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WAY 2 GO: Certainly requires some practice
final score. As typical for Bruno Cathala
anism blended with a semi-theme. In this game, players can make decisions rather quickly – but this doesn’t make it banal. Bees and blossoms are faced with a cer- tain dilemma in respect to one another, and this makes for the actual appeal, one that convincingly unfolds in a good thirty minutes; it is certainly more crisp and entertaining than the above-mentioned reference game. -cc/sbw
Schmidt
Last year, NSV was the first company to do it: In Silver & Gold, players marked laminated cards. The dice-driven Man muss auch gönnen können has such cards, too. And here also, they don’t score immediately but only after having been completed – which is considerably more intricate in this game, though. On your turn, you roll the dice up to three times, basically trying to get a result that fulfills the requirements of one of your cards: cer- tain numbers, often in a specific die col- or – a task that is impossible to solve in the beginning. The special feature is that the other players may use all the numbers from your re-rolled dice for crossing out spaces on one of their own cards without having to complete it – this is where the game title comes from (loosely translated: “You have to grant something to others, too”). If you roll only once, the freeload- ers will go away empty-handed, but your chance is rather slim to get the benefit you’ve been hoping for. There are two types of cards with spaces to cross out, for which (except for the starting display) you need certain dice results. Complete- ly crossed-out bonus cards water down the cross-out restrictions, whereas scor- ing cards give you points for the display constellation. Since the strict conditions would be too frustrating, they are soft- ened by exception rules according to which you are allowed to cross one of the spaces out and acquire a random card. Anything but brisk; on the contrary, it is pretty tricky and broody, since you need to consider many interconnections; so the suggested playing time of 30 minutes is hardly enough.
Considered rationally, Die Wikinger Saga consists of eight rounds. But it has a much nicer ring to it when you read that Jarls, rulers of Viking villages, take you through eight (out of almost three
the game uses an original abstract mech h
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