Dew Drops & Koi Ponds
- Board's Eye View
- Oct 7
- 2 min read
We featured Tin Robot Games' Garden Geckos 18 months ago on Board's Eye View. It's a tile laying set collection game which proved a hit with the Board's Eye View team and which had a successful launch on Kickstarter. Tin Robot are returning to Kickstarter with a pack of three mini-expansions that add a further dimension to the game. You can add the expansions individually or include all of them with your game.
The not-very-catchily named Point-Vendor-Market expansion is a small deck of cards that introduce an additional way of scoring. If you've collected the combination of bugs shown on one of the cards, you can elect to cash them in and take the card's 6 points. To play with this mini-expansion you just need to set out the eight market cards above the market display of terrain and bug objective cards you have in the core game. Your bugs are ordinarily worth 1 point each in end-game scoring, so cashing them in with a Point-Vendor-Market card is a way of doubling their value. There's only one of each type, so if another player nabs a card ahead of you then you won't be able to claim it. That means there can be a race element in claiming these cards.
The Dew Drops and Koi Ponds mini-expansions both work in a similar way to each other in that they function as 'wilds'. To incorporate the Dew Drops expansion, players each start with one Dew Drop bead. On your turn, when you place a gecko you can choose to place your Dew Drop on top of one of the bugs that your gecko is touching. This makes the bug 'wild' so it can be counted as any bug type for the purpose of claiming an objective. However, this 'wild' status can be similarly used by any player who has a gecko adjacent to it - not just the player who placed the Dew Drop. And when the tile a Dew Drop is on is completely surrounded, the player with the most geckos can choose to take the Dew Drop instead of that tile's bug...
If you include the Koi Ponds mini-expansion, each player starts with one Koi Pond tile. When you place out a gecko, you can opt to place your Koi Pond under the gecko where it will mean that terrain counts as any terrain type. When you use a Koi Pond tile to claim a terrain objective the tile is flipped so it can be used for that purpose only once.
All three of these mini-expansions are easily integrated with the core game and none over-complicate gameplay so you can probably incorporate them even with those coming new to this light family game.
The Garden Geckos Dew Drops & Koi Ponds expansion will be coming to Kickstarter very shortly. Click here to find out more.
