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Gamehelpgardensofenceladus
Goal
Help your little Martian gardener harvest flowers from the icy garden of Enceladus. Collect a good mix of colours: the player with the best hand wins. A hand is the number of flowers of each of the five colours, sorted from lowest to highest. A hand with no flowers of some colour is terribly low.
Components
Setup
- The 10 x 10 garden is filled: 95 flowers (19 of each of the five colours) and 5 peaks
(huge ice structures that block the Martians). The peaks never fence off a section of the garden. - Each player chooses a Martian type (
Bot,
Ali,
Marty,
Bob or
Robby; the type does not change how the game plays) and places the Martian on a start square outside the garden: on the left, right or bottom side. Players choose in turn order. - The carrying tube
starts empty. Flowers paid for special actions go into the tube. - The starting player goes first, then play continues in turn order.
Your turn
Special actions
Pay 3 flowers of one colour. The paid flowers go into the carrying tube
. The 10 special actions are printed beside the garden (above it on a phone). Tap an icon to use that action when it is available, or tap your Martian, a flower, a peak or the tube to start from that piece.
- Tap your Martian to see the actions that start from it (Jump
, Diagonal
, Swap Martian
). - Tap a flower or a peak
to see the actions that start from it (Pick
, Swap
, Move
). - Tap the tube
to use the Tube action, or the grey wildflower
beside it to take it. - Or press Special action in the bar above the board to see everything you can use now.
The board then highlights the squares you can choose. Choose the squares, pay with a colour (if you have more than one colour with 3 or more flowers, the colour buttons ask you), and confirm.
After a special action is used, it is covered with a disc
in that player's colour. The special actions a player has already used are also shown as small icons in that player's panel. The tube is shown next to the garden (above it on a phone) and lists how many flowers of each colour are inside it (payments are public). A Martian still standing outside the garden cannot use the actions that move a Martian (jump, diagonal and swap Martian). It enters the garden with its first move.
Scoring your hand
- Count the flowers of each colour in your reserve, including zeros, and sort the five numbers from lowest to highest.
- The grey wildflower
counts as any one colour. It is declared automatically as the colour that gives the best hand. - The player panel shows your hand as Score: 2-3-3-4-5: the five counts sorted from lowest to highest.
- Example: 0, 4, 5, 5, 6 is shown as 0-4-5-5-6 and is a low hand. 3, 4, 5, 5, 6 is a better hand because its lowest colour is higher. Hands are compared by the lowest count first; if equal, by the next, and so on.
- The highest hand wins. Two equal hands share the win.
- The score star (and BGA's ranking table) shows rank points: with N players the best hand gets N-1, the next N-2, and so on down to 0. Equal hands share the same (higher) rank points. During the game the star shows the current ranking.
Game end
- If, on your turn, your Martian cannot reach any flower, the game ends immediately. You can still use special actions first to make a move. If you cannot move and have nothing else to do, the game ends with the scoring.
- The scoring shows each player's sorted hand at the end of the game.
Variants (game options)
- Game mode: Competitive (standard), or Cooperative. In the cooperative game the team score is the lowest hand (all players get the same score), and everyone works to make it as high as possible.
- Martians per player: One (standard), or Two for the 2-player variant. Each player places two Martians and can move either one on the turn. All the special actions in a turn must use the Martian you move that turn.
- Tube action: Available (standard), or not available (purely combinatorial game). With the combinatorial variant, the tube action is covered at the start.
- Hidden score (reserves behind a screen) is not in this version: reserves are always visible, as the standard rules require.
Notes on the rules
- Flowers that are not in a Martian's line cannot be reached: a Martian only moves along its row or column.
- A flower can end up under a Martian only through a swap. It is picked up later by the Pick action or by the soliflower step.
- A payment is always 3 flowers of one colour. The grey wildflower cannot be used to pay, because it has no colour until scoring.