The Hanging Gardens
- Board's Eye View
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
In this 1-5 player game from Gigamic, over twelve rounds you're drafting tiles to build your own pyramid-shaped garden. The game is designed by Grégory Grard and Matthieu Verdier, with art by Miguel Coimbra, and it's distributed in the UK by Hachette Boardgames.
There's a market display of tiles, and on your turn you can draft any tile from the column where you have your gardener meeple. The lowest tile is always free but you have to pay the cost in tools to draft tiles higher in the column. Drafted tiles are added to your pyramid tableau, in that a tile can be in a row adjacent to an existing tile or placed above so that it straddles two tiles below it. Tiles score for their relative positions and for the set collection bonuses you can claim for the various tile characteristics. Some give immediate bonuses, including money (used to buy enhancements that can be added to 'empty' tiles) and tools.
Players will obviously be competing for the tiles in the market display and to be the first to meet 'royal objectives' bonus requirements, and it's possible for other players to block access to a column, but that's pretty much the extent of the player interaction. Hanging Gardens is a game where players can focus on their own tableaus without worrying overly about 'take that' sniping from across the table.
The Hanging Gardens plays well at all player counts, but there'll obviously be a more volatile market as the player count increases: at two players you have a good idea of what tiles will be available to you on your next turn but with five players the market will have changed markedly before your next turn comes around. However, turns in Hanging Gardens are quick, so you won't find yourself hanging about waiting for your next turn - even in a five-player game. All of our plays at Board's Eye View ran to 20-30 minutes, making Hanging Gardens a satisfying filler-length game.
We'll never know for sure what the actual Hanging Gardens of Babylon really looked like, or even if they ever actually existed because, of all the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it's the one for which no evidence has been found. Playing this game tho' left some of us wondering... if the gardens are hanging, shouldn't the pyramids be inverted so that each level overhangs the one below? :-)
