A game for players with green fingers and tasty ingredients. Don’t have any yet? Maybe you’ll get the urge after playing this game! Pick and pot herbs, but don’t wait too long. Make sure your fellow players don’t pick your chosen herbs before you do.

Beoordeling

Overall	9
Story	7
Game System	9
Design & Art	9,5
Replayability	10

Herbaceous is a game for 1 to 4 players aged 8 and up. It takes about 20 minutes to play. Objective: Try to earn as many victory points as possible by picking herbs from your own garden and the communal garden and potting them.

Game Rules

In the first round, there are no herbs that you can pick and pot. So this step is skipped. Go straight to the Planting step. During the game, you can also choose to skip the herb potting step until enough herbs have been planted to pick and pot the best combination.

A turn is played in the following steps, in the order listed below

• Pot Herbs ( optional): To do this, follow these steps: choose 1 of your own Container Cards to use.

• Choose a set of Herb Cards from the community garden and/or your own garden. This set must meet the requirements of the chosen Container Card. Slide the set face down under the chosen Container Card.

Rules for potting herbs

• Each type of breeding gear may only be used once per game and only one type per turn.
• The ‘special herbs’, the herbs with a point value in the top left corner, may only be placed in the glass jar. When you are the first to have at least 1 herb of each value in the Glass Jar Container, you receive the herb scone. This is worth 5 points when scoring.

• Plant (mandatory): As long as there are cards left in the herb deck. Plant herbs in your private garden or in the community garden by following these steps.

• Take a card from the deck: decide immediately where you want to plant it, in your private garden or your community garden.
• Then take a new card and place it in the garden you did not choose where you planted your first card.

End of the game

When the herb deck is empty, the end of the game is initiated. Players continue picking herbs to pot. When no more herbs can be picked or everyone has used their Container Cards, the game ends.
Add up your score, conveniently displayed on the Container Card and in the rulebook. The player with the most points wins the game.

Content and design:

With Herbaceous, Pencil First Games has created a beautiful, easy-to-play game. The graphics are incredibly beautiful and have a warm feel to them, a fine achievement by Beth Sobel. The cards are of good quality and showcase the drawing style beautifully.

Verder in de doos

• 63x herb cards (9x per different type)
• 9x special herb cards (3x per different type)
• 16x container cards (4 different types in 4 game colours)
• 4x label cards
• 1x herb scone card
• 4x overview cards

Conclusion

Herbaceous is a game that is not too difficult to explain, but it is full of tactical choices. Because you can only use each growing tool once, you only have four moments to collect as many points as possible. So you have to weigh up your time and your choices carefully.
The cards are illustrated and use symbols and numbers, which means that whatever language you speak, you can play this game once you know the rules. Quality Beast has made a good choice here.

A big plus point of the game is that it includes a 4-player mode, a team variant and a solo mode in the rule book. These are important plus points for me. It also fully covers the creators’ mission to get people back to the table and create connections. The team variant is a good way for parents to get their younger children involved in the game and thus instil the warmth of sitting around the table with family or friends at an early age.

A minor point of criticism: the story is not particularly extensive, but I wonder if this is necessary for this game. Perhaps not, but I always enjoy being drawn into a story. It does not detract from the game at all! becomes a story. It does not detract from the game at all!

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Text and photography: Esmeralda Wolf