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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Rio Grande Games | Hanging Gardens

Hanging Gardens

Price: £27.99

Players 2-4, Ages 8+ The hanging gardens were one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, as all history courses teach. But did they actually exist? Nothing remains of their reported splendour, which was built for the eyes of Amyitis. Without an exact reference to follow, the 2-4 players will re-establish the hanging gardens according to their own tastes. In the end, the queen will be pleased and rewards the victory palm to the player whose work on the gardens most impresses her highness. +++++++++++++++++++++ Counter Magazine Review +++++++++++++++++++++ 2-4 players, 45 minutes designed by Din Li reviewed by Stuart Dagger Another new flag for your map marking the countries of origin of the world\'s game designers: this time that of Taiwan. Die Hängenden Gärten is a game with a small but simple puzzle element, which sees players fitting cards together in a 3-dimensional array to create the hanging gardens of the title. As the gardens take shape they will form areas of fountains, parklands, etc and these entitle the players to claim scoring tiles. These scoring tiles come in several patterns and are worth more in victory points if you collect ones of the same type. These then are the two ideas on which the game is based: how you create your garden and how it is scored. The first is elegant, original and resonates nicely with the theme; the second, though related to scoring systems we have seen before, still manages to be novel by introducing a couple of clever refinements to those predecessors. Each card is split into 6 squared areas. Some of these are blank; on others there is a picture of either a terrace, a park, an arcade or a fountain. In most cases it is 2 or 3 of the 6 squares that are illustrated, but there are a few with 1 or 4. Each player also has a starting card on which all 6 squares are blank. At the start of each round 3-4 cards are turned over from the face-down deck, and the basic idea is that players will take turns to take one and add it to their display. The puzzle element comes from the rules restricting what can be placed where. The idea is that in a hanging garden features are raised above the surrounding countryside, and in game terms that translates into a rule that says an illustrated square on a card can never be ``flat to the table\'\'. There must always be at least one section of another card directly beneath it. As a result you will often find yourself having to ``over build\'\' previously existing features and one of the challenges is to try and expand your area so as to provide flexibility for future placements and thereby avoid situations where one of these over-builds damages your plans. Scoring opportunities are created when you manage to place a card so as to create an area of at least three contiguous squares showing the same illustration. This entitles you to ``build a temple\'\' (place a wooden piece on one of the squares) and claim a scoring tile, of which there are six on display. Two of the six are available to anyone claiming for an area of at least three squares; a further two for areas of size four or more; and the final two for areas of size at least five. So the bigger your area, the greater your choice. A further bonus is offered for areas of size greater than or equal to six: here you not only get to choose any of the six displayed tiles, but in addition get a blind draw from the stack of tiles not yet used. Building a temple is not obligatory, as you may wish to hold off in the hope of making the area bigger. However, you can\'t hold off in order to defer making a decision, as you can only place the temple and take the tile at the point when the area is either created or enlarged. Nor can you build a second temple in an area that already has one. So not scoring an area as soon as it has formed carries risk as well as the prospect of a better reward. It could easily happen that an enforced over-build destroys an area on which you were holding back in the hope of better things. This is particularly the case once you have some temples already built, as you are not allowed to either move them or build on top of them and that further restricts where you can place your next card. There are 49 scoring tiles, of which 44 are divided into seven sets of between 4 and 10 tiles each. At the bottom of each tile is a sequence of 2-4 numbers which tell you how many victory points you get for having one or more tiles in the set. For example, there are 6 ``garden\'\' scoring tiles and they carry the sequence 2-8-16. One tile is worth 2 points; two are worth 8 and three are worth 16. Another set, the ``goblets\'\', contains 10 tiles and has the sequence 3-7-12-20. The things to note here are firstly that the sequence is not linear, but instead rewards those who have collected sets. This is not a surprise, because by now we are all used to games which make use of the triangular and related sequences. The second point is that there are fewer numbers in the sequence than there are tiles in the set. This is the clever little scoring refinement that I referred to earlier and it has a significant and beneficial consequence. By capping the sequences the designer has prevented them from getting out of hand and making the whole game dependent on who can collect the largest set. In this game the big points for a ``complete set\'\' are relatively commonplace, which makes them important but not all-important. So what happens if you have more tiles than you need to score the top number in a sequence? You start a second set. So four garden tiles would be worth 16+2=18 points and five would be worth 16+8=24. The other five scoring tiles are personalities, each corresponding to one of the seven sets. The scores for these depend on how many tiles you have in the corresponding set. For example, the gardener tile is worth 0 points of you have no garden tiles, 3 if you have one or two, and a juicy 11 if you have 3 or more. It is this importance of collecting tiles that score well together that will tend to determine whether or not you claim for an area as soon as it contains three squares. If the tile you want is in column one, you cash early; if it is out in column three, you will at least think about holding off. Whether or not the cards and tiles fall favourably for you is not really within your control, and because of this the luck factor in the game is quite high. It can also be frustrating when you are last to go in a round and Hobson\'s Choice lands you with a card which wrecks the area you had been trying to grow. This is why, as Martin Leathwood notes in his report from The Gathering, the game is one that will divide people quite sharply. Is the charm and the interest that you get from trying to create and collect enough to offset the fact that fate will quite frequently stop you achieving your objectives. For my part, I find the level of luck acceptable in a 45 minute game and enjoy both the theme and the neatness of the mechanisms. The game isn\'t likely to feature in my top five of the year when that list comes to be compiled, but I\'m glad that I bought it and expect it to get a fair amount of play.

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Main Catalogue | BOARD GAMES & CARD GAMES | Rio Grande Games | Hanging Gardens

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