Tend Flip & Write Review - Steve's view!
WBG Score: 8.5
Player Count: 1-6
You’ll like this if you like: Twilight Inscription, Hadrian's Wall, Scratch Cards
Published by: IV Studio
Designed by: Max Anderson, Zac Dixon, Austin Harrison, Toby Sarnelle
This is a free review copy. See our review policy here
By Steve Godfrey
It's typical. You finally land on an alien planet excited to discover all of its mysteries and new life forms and the first thing they get you doing is gardening! It's like, wow, do you even want me to enjoy this new planet!?
How to Tend your Garden
If you clicked on this page because some AI search about gardening led you here; then I’d suggest you look up Alan Titchmarsh instead. If however you want a brief overview on how to play the board game Tend then stick around.
To set up, give everyone their two sheets, pencils, scratch cards (not the lottery ones; it's not that kind of game) scratch coin, a resource conversion board and two neighbour cards for each side of their sheets for which players will pick one for each side. Then set up the season cards as per the rulebook and place five of the starter cards face up in a row. Then place the season cards in two decks above the two right most starter cards and flip the top card of each deck face up.
Each round is played simultaneously and during a round you will pick 2 of the five cards on display and perform those actions. Early cards will just have one action on them and as the game progresses cards may have multiple actions to pick from and will also have another action/resource you can use if you satisfy the conditions on the card to get them. At the end of the round discard the five cards, fill in three cards from the main deck and then pull the two face up cards down to make five cards in the row then flip the cards on top of those decks face up to give you some insight for the next round. After rounds 6, 10 and 12 you’ll score the objective cards for that round.
What are the actions I hear you cry as you milk your space pumpkins and put soil over your space cows (yeah I shouldn't work on a space farm) Well it's an excellent question. But first let me go over a couple of concepts real quick. First, resources have to be used in that round. You can't store them up and use them in one hit later. There are plenty of ways to use them on your sheets to get upgrades etc. You also have a trading board (basically a conversion chart) and rather than use them on your sheet you may trade a resource for coins or you can store them in your cargo as coloured Tetris shape pieces. This is a space on your second sheet in which you’ll have three sections to put these shapes in. Each space you fill will be worth one point at the end of the game. However, one section will give you zero points for a particular colour and one section will give you 2 points per space of a particular colour. You also have neighbour cards and when you gain a resource that's on one of these cards you can instead give it to the neighbour on that side of you rather than spending it for yourself. When you do, you mark the next space in that side's progress track and gain the resources. These tracks are also used in endgame scoring against your neighbour. Before the next round starts you can spend any gained neighbour cards resources. Now onto the actions.
The Road Goes Ever On.
The Mining and the Chopping action both work pretty much the same. They both have their own section on the scratch card. For each action scratch off one space for that action and gain the resource and any upgrade. Each section has a road going through from top to bottom and this is generally the quickest route to the bottom of that section. You’ll want to do this because as you dig or chop down you can move onto the second chopping/mining area. This costs two actions to scratch a space you will get much better resources. The road will give you basic resources but going off the beaten track will yield better results.
When fishing you'll roll the black and the white dice. Each one relates to an edge of a grid of resources. Find the space where these two cross over and get that resource. Be careful though because some spaces don't have resources in the basic grid. During the game you can upgrade your fishing card and rod for better resources and a bigger target area so you don't miss out on resources.
Tending lets you till soil, which you'll then be able to plant crops on. The more soil you till the bigger the crops you can plant by placing dice on your farm. Dice will tick up each round and on certain faces you'll be able to use the resources. At the end of their cycle they will be discarded. You can also use the tend action to water and tick up those dice and all dice adjacent to them. In this same field you can also use free actions to spend resources to build paddocks. Once complete you can place animals in them. These will also tick up to give you resources, the difference being that these will not get discarded after they complete their cycles, It’d be a pretty dark game if they did!. Instead they'll reset.
At the end of the game you’ll score the objective points, points for filled spaces in your cargo and points from the neighbour tracks. For every space further up a track more than your neighbour you'll score three points
A garden so big even Ground Force would hesitate.
You’re going to be overwhelmed by Tend to start off with. As you look upon the two sheets and the scratch card and this whole cacophony of symbols it’s hard not to be. I’ll be honest, this gets worse once you’ve learned the game! Before, these symbols didn’t mean anything and you didn’t have to worry about them. Once you know the game you now have to do something with them and that’s the tricky part. Luckily the rules or a good teacher will have you covered. They tell you to focus on just a couple of the main actions and this advice is key because as nice as it is to have all those options, it’s nicer to have permission to ignore about half of them, it's like the weight of a massive space cow has been lifted from your shoulders.
The great thing about tend is that it gives you enough turns to get your head around the gameplay, especially if you heed the above advice so by the end of the game you’ll have a good understanding of how it all works, or at the very least, the actions you chose to focus on this game. I’m not saying you’ll necessarily be efficient in your first game but you should definitely be able to identify where you went wrong and what you’ll need to do in your next, and believe me you’ll want another game. As much as some gamers complain about ‘beat your own score’ solo modes in games, there’s something very different about doing it when it’s part of a competitive setting and it keeps you coming back to try and do exactly that. Yes you want to beat your opponents but if you do or you don’t you’ll secretly just be happy if you can beat your score from last time. Whether you take a similar line as the first game or veer into a different path the game seems to reward that extra touch of knowledge you brought over from your previous game. That's not to say that you can’t be competitive in your first game, trust me I've been destroyed by people who after a couple of turns got this game and ran with it.
In a hobby where we spend so much time banging on about replayability having so many options to and paths to victory must be great right? Well, yeah, of course. It may be overwhelming but just having all those buttons to push and levers to pull is gonna appeal to anyone, unless your name is Yzema then it's understandable that you've got an aversion to levers. A lot of your turns can be a litany of choices and everyone you pick will set up a multiverse of other future choices which in turn will set up another and another and each can turn into satisfying combo after satisfying combo. It makes for a game that you keep wanting to come back to time and again to try new paths. Like most games of its ilk, Tend ramps up as the rounds go on and that’s most evident as the season cards change and the previous cards cycle through the deck. When you first look at those action cards with the pre requisites on you’d be forgiven for wondering why such lofty goals have been placed on these very early cards. However as they get cycled through the deck those goals are more easily achievable. With that comes more resources with which you can do even more things on your turn. I really like that the next two season cards are visible during the current round. If you’re having trouble deciding where to make your next mark then these may give you a little bit of an incentive, especially if doing so will help you get those in the next round.
Whilst we all love the satisfaction of pulling off those big combos I don't want to sit here and claim that every turn is going to give you those. Your first rounds will see you laying the groundwork for these for example but even later turns have the possibility to feel sedate compared to others around the table and I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel a bit crummy having to sit there while others take much longer turns than you. Again, a bit of experience with the game can certainly alleviate this.
Everybody needs good neighbours
It's nice to help others, occasionally. Depending on the neighbour cards you have, you can gift resources on that card to a neighbour. Decisions on giving away resources are a mixed bag. Sometimes it may be a no-brainer. If a resource is just gonna give you a single coin or mark on your cargo sheet or doesn't fall in line with your current strategy then giving it away for a boost on that track is well worth it. It’s when you have to give away those more hard earned resources that the decision becomes a bit harder. Subsequently, gaining those resources could be the difference you need to get an all important upgrade. Having the neighbour cards and those tracks be part of end game scoring is a great way to make sure that people are encouraged to share. Sharing is caring right? Even if you are competing against Ted in the neighbouring garden about who can grow the biggest mutated space pumpkin in the soon to be announced county fair. Do alien planets have county fairs? They do once the humans have colonised them!
There are still a few caveats to this though. Depending on what cards you get depends on how often you have the opportunity to share. If you get a card that gives you a resource that you're just not getting then you’re not going to be able to give that card and move up the track. Conversely, if your neighbour on that side is getting all the easy stuff and gifting cards every round then there's no way you can even think to compete for that track potentially losing you a ton of points. Considering that these tracks make up one of three major end game scoring conditions it’s even more devastating if you're locked out due to a bad card draw. Luckily you are able to discard any neighbour card that you don't like but you don't get to redraw new ones until the neighbour phase. It doesn't alleviate the problem all together because it can still put you behind and play catch up but it's better than being locked out completely. It doesn't mean you should give up altogether as the tracks do contain some juicy bonuses.
The non sunny side of the garden.
Every action will get you something and all have this great sense of escalation as the game goes on and you start to upgrade your gear. All except fishing. I’d say that this may be the only action you don't want to touch until you’ve upgraded your fishing rod; because boy does this feel rough when the dice don’t roll your way and you don’t get a resource for it. It feels like such a waste of an action and early game that can be a big hit. I get that it’s thematic to actual fishing and it encourages you to upgrade the rod early but it puts me off using it until I’ve upgraded. The problem is, once I’ve put the effort into upgrading, I’ve probably pushed too far into other actions and fishing may be the least profitable of the actions at that point.
I’ve said before that this game can be overwhelming to look at but also be aware that can also be the case as your turns get more overwrought. With that chain of ever cascading resources it can sometimes be hard to keep track of which you've used and which you've still got available. I love how productive those turns feel but don’t necessarily love just how crazy they can get. Maybe some kind of wipeable resource tracker could be useful? But this would just be more space on the table and another addition to the cost of the game.
Speaking of cost. At £73 for a retail copy, Tend is not a cheap game in the flip n write category and many other categories as well. Don’t get me wrong, you’re getting A LOT in this box and it’s really well produced. You’re getting a ton of dice, scratch cards, sheets and pencils for six players. With that you’re obviously going to get a ton of replayability from this box before you even need to think about getting new packs of sheets. More so if you play with fewer players. Plus you can also use the app instead of using the scratch cards to squeeze more value from these. This is still a high price point from the off and while value is obviously subjective I do think it’s worth doing your research to see if this is a game for you. I’d even recommend playing it first if you can to get a feel for it, doubly so depending on your feelings on flip and writes.
There are upgrades you can get for it as well like the playmat and the marker set which you’ll most likely have seen. These don’t come with the game. I was lucky enough to be sent a set with my review copy. These are very cool but a full set is gonna set you back a decent chunk of change. If this is gonna be a regularly loved game on your table then that price tag will just be a drop in the ocean for the enjoyment that you're getting from it. If however your used to the more travel sized and cheaper priced games in this genre then the more involved gameplay and the cost may be more of a hurdle to overcome hence the suggestion that you do a bit of research before jumping in to this admittedly enticing box.
If you want something with a bit more meat on the bones from the flip and write genre then Tend is a great step in the WRITE direction (I’m not apologising for that.) The theme will appeal to more of the community (gamers love farming right) and while initially daunting with a load of options, its actual rule set is pretty straight forward so it makes the game that nice step up into more heavier games in this category, not that there are that many of them.
Right, I need to go and see if there's a way I can get out of all this gardening. I think I saw Matt Damon around here earlier, I hear he’s quite good with some science and a few potatoes.
