Hello everyone!
Today I am bringing you a quick and beautiful game about decorating our home with plants. Will you manage to place your plants in the best spots possible?
Game Overview
Verdant is a 2022 release for 1 to 5 players, ages 10+, with a playtime of 30 to 45 minutes. It was designed by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Aaron Mesburne, Kevin Russ and Shawn Stankewich and illustrated by Beth Sobel and published by AEG. I own the French version, published by Lucky Duck Games.
This game grew out of the Flatout Games CoLab, an initiative started by Flatout Games where several people from the board game industry team up to make games together.
Theme
Verdant is a cozy game where you organise houseplants around your home to help them grow better. You’ll look for the best light for each type of plant and create harmonies by grouping the same kinds of plants together.
How to Win
The player with the most points wins the game. Points come from several sources: fully grown plants, room bonuses, and objective cards.
Setup
Shuffle the plant and room cards, then create a market of 4 plant cards, with 4 random item tokens below them, and 4 face up room cards below those. Reveal 3 goal cards: plant, item, and room. Give each player a random plant and room card to start.
Components
Inside the box you’ll find plant cards, room cards, and goal cards, plus a bag full of item tokens (furniture and pets) and nurture tokens. There are pot tokens in four kinds, concrete, wood, ceramic, and terracotta, along with verdancy tokens and green thumb tokens.
Gameplay
You build a grid of 3 rows by 5 columns, alternating plant and room cards like a chessboard. Each room card shows a light indication on each side. When a plant matches the light from its neighbouring room, you place a verdancy token on it. Each plant needs a certain number of verdancy tokens to fully grow, and once that number is reached you place a pot on it. Verdancy tokens come from two sources: matching light requirements and nurture tokens.
Each column in the market holds three things: a plant, a token, and a room. On your turn, you take one card and its matching token from the same column. The remaining card in that column gains a green thumb token, so the next time someone takes that card, they gain a green thumb token too, the only way to get them. You can hold a maximum of 5 green thumb tokens at once. Green thumb tokens matter because they let you influence the market, either changing which cards are available or securing a better card and token combination.
There isn’t a huge number of combos in Verdant, but timing matters. With nurture tokens, it’s worth thinking ahead about when you’ll get the most benefit from using one. Sometimes it pays to hold onto a token in storage and wait rather than using it right away.
The game ends when the grid is completed.
If you’re playing solo like I usually do, here’s what changes.
Solo Mode
The solo mode is a BYOS (Beat Your Own Score), with scenarios offering different goal combinations. You can track your results on a table provided with the game.
The main difference from multiplayer is that each turn you discard the rightmost column, slide all remaining cards to the right, and complete the card and token rows again. The market works like a conveyor belt.
For pots, each column starts with a concrete pot token above it. Whenever you complete a plant, you take the pot above the rightmost column. If you complete more than one plant in the same turn, you take the lowest value pot available from the discard pile for the extra plants. If you don’t complete any plant that turn, the pot above the discarded column is simply removed. When the market refills, a new pot moves into the space above the leftmost column, taken from a separate stack arranged with the highest value pots on top and terracotta pots at the bottom.
There’s one exception: on the 13th and final turn, the pot above the leftmost column will always be terracotta. If you finish more than one plant on that last turn, all of them get potted with terracotta pots regardless of their usual value.
My Experience
I’ve played Verdant six times now. My first play, without any objectives or scenarios, was just to learn and understand the game, and I scored 69. The second and third plays were both with Scenario 1, since I wanted to get comfortable with how objectives work before moving on, and I scored 81 and 82. Then came Scenario 2 with 89, and Scenario 3 with 87.
The first two scenarios are a nice, gentle introduction: their objectives simply add to your scoring without asking you to sacrifice anything, so you don’t really have to rethink your usual approach. Scenario 3 felt different. One of its objectives rewards you with 2 points for terracotta pots, the ones that normally score 0. Suddenly, rushing to finish your plants early for the best pots isn’t as urgent, and that completely shifts your priorities.
I got a bit too tempted by that objective, if I’m honest. I delayed finishing some of my plants to chase it, and ended up unable to complete two of them by the end of the game. If I hadn’t delayed, I could have scored better overall, better pots, better final score. Still, the scenario only needed 75 points and I finished well above that, so it wasn’t a disaster, just a lesson in not letting one objective pull you away from the bigger picture.
Scenario 4 was a different story altogether, and my first actual loss. This one requires completing all of your plants to pass, no exceptions. I finished with 74 points, just short of the 75 needed, and I had one plant left incomplete, only 2 verdancy tokens away from finishing it. It stung a little, but it was a good kind of frustration, the kind that makes you want to set the game up again immediately to try a different approach.
Completing plants has consistently been my biggest source of points across all six plays, so both the Scenario 3 detour and the Scenario 4 loss were good reminders of how differently each scenario makes you think about your priorities.
Visually, this game is a joy on the table. The plant illustrations are gorgeous, every single one, and once your tableau is filled out, the vibrant colours and the chessboard-like alternation between plant and room cards make for a genuinely beautiful sight.
What I really appreciate about the scenarios is how much they add to the solo experience specifically. As a BYOS game, Verdant could risk feeling like it runs out of steam once you know the base rules, but the scenarios give you a real sense of purpose and guidance each time, whether that’s a strategic detour like Scenario 3 or a proper challenge like Scenario 4.
I haven’t tried Verdant at higher player counts, and I’m honestly not that eager to. I imagine it holds up well in multiplayer too, but the cozy, relaxing quality I love about it feels very tied to playing it solo, no pressure, no competing with anyone else’s tableau, just me and my little plant puzzle to unwind with.
My Rating
Rate: 8/10
Verdant is a good puzzle: clever and beautiful. My one wish would be an automa that picks cards instead of simply discarding the rightmost column each round, which would add a bit of surprise. But as it stands, that predictability is part of what makes it feel cosy.
Final Thoughts
Verdant is a beautiful, clever puzzle that rewards you for slowing down and paying attention, both to your plants and to your own priorities. What really won me over, though, is how much the scenarios add to the solo experience. A BYOS game can start to feel aimless once you know the rules, but Verdant gives you a genuine reason to come back with each new scenario, a different challenge, a different way to rethink your usual strategy. A play takes around 40 minutes, so it’s easy to fit into a relaxing evening, and if you enjoy a cozy, puzzly game that still manages to surprise you, this one’s a lovely pick.
Your Turn
Have you tried Verdant yet? And if you have, which scenarios have you played?
Come share your comments on Mastodon, Facebook, and BoardGameGeek.
Related Links
Videos
- Verdant - Straight Up Solo with John LaRuffa - A solo mode playthrough from Straight Up Solo
- Verdant Gameplay Preview - A gameplay walkthrough from Rahdo Runs Through
- Verdant - Overview - An overview from Boardgame Stories, filmed during the Kickstarter campaign