Review: Tea Garden (Capstone Games)

It’s another busy day in your tea garden. Your assistant wants to talk about the the next expansion, and the shipping captain discovered new opportunities waiting down-river. A tea-hungry caravan is passing through the nearby town — and the emperor himself may be in the area! Oh, and one of your apprentices wants to study in the tea university, but they promise to make it worth your investment.

All this and more awaits you in Tea Garden from Capstone Games. Tea Garden gives players the challenge of launching and growing the first tea gardens in the Yunnan region of China.

Opportunities abound as your customers demand this magical drink, so let’s not keep them waiting. Here are the top five things you need to know about Tea Garden.

Tea Is Money

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The sooner you latch onto this basic idea, the better you’ll do in the game: Tea is money, period. It has no value beyond that. It took until our second game for both of us to truly wrap our heads around this. (Someone — *cough* John *cough* — was a slow learner.)

To get more money, expand your tea gardens and grow more and better tea. To give yourself more ways to use your tea, ferment it so it increases in value. But don’t get too carried away because many actions work with any quality tea, fermented or not. “The right tea at the right time” is a great motto for Tea Garden.

Improving Your Deck

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All players begin with the same mix of 11 basic cards in their decks. As you play, you want to fill your deck with better cards while getting rid of the basic ones.

In the beginning, most of your cards have a power of one plus a symbol that either helps you buy new cards or triggers a secondary action (more about that in a moment). You also get two cards with two power but no other ability.

Over the course of the game, you can either buy or earn new cards for your deck. Some cards give you actions to draw and discarding a card or even remove it for the duration of this game. Many advanced cards also give you bonus victory points, too.

Building Gardens and Buying Cards

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Every turn, you play one or more cards from your hand and choose a main action, provided you have the right resources to do it. When playing your cards on a turn, you always put the cards in a staggered stack with one card visible and the rest showing only their top sections.

Building a new tea garden costs tea. Tea gardens get more expensive as you put more of them on the board. Every time you build a new garden, you get access to more tea plus a one-time bonus of some kind. Try to chain these bonuses so they let you accomplish several things in a single turn.

Buying cards requires having enough tea of the right grade, plus one or more visible tea pot icons in the correct colors on your player board. These new cards display more icons, giving you more options and abilities to set up combinations.

Fermenting and Selling

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To improve your tea’s quality and value, you can ferment a few leaves each round by flipping

over their tokens from green to brown. The longer you hold fermented tea, the more valuable it becomes. Green tea either gets used quickly or slowly spoils after a few rounds. Either way, remember that tea is money: some actions require fermented leaves, while others want any tea they can get.

Caravans are always available to buy teas in exchange for victory points, special actions, and ability tokens. To get a caravan’s attention, you need the right mix of tea in storage and power from that turn’s action cards.

Secondary Actions Do a Lot

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Some of your starter cards — and almost all upgrade cards — display symbols that trigger secondary actions. Each of these drives one of the game’s subsystems to give you more abilities, grant you tokens, or score victory points.

The secondary systems include navigating the river, serving cups of tea, and studying at the university. Some also help you impress the emperor and earn super-powerful cards for your deck.

In an interesting twist, the game doesn’t want you to ignore or obsessively focus on any one of these options. Instead, you need to do a little bit here and a little bit there, always looking for ways to make each activity pay off in multiple ways.

Verdict

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Tea Garden from Capstone Games challenges players to build a tea empire through timely choices, careful expansion, and bold strategy — and do it all while juggling a bunch of different action and ability systems.

The game weaves together something for everyone, with deck building, area expansion, commerce, combo plays, and event triggers. And just to make things even more interesting, it’s also time-limited to five rounds with 3 or 4 turns per round.

Game setup introduces several random elements that promise to keep replays unique by altering the card mixes and board bonuses.

Our sole concern is accessibility. To differentiate many of its elements, the game’s gorgeous board and card art relies heavily on identical icons toned with low-contrast colors. If your game group includes people with vision limitations, you may need to go after the cards with a fine point marker.

Recommended!