Reef Gardens
Grab your wetsuit and SCUBA gear* as we head under the sea to restore the coral beds in Reef Gardens by Jeffrey D Allers, published by dlp Games, for 2-4 players and playing in around 60 minutes.
Reef Gardens is a reimplementation of Jeffrey Allers’ earlier game Citrus (dlp games) but has a much fresher and more vibrant aesthetic - neon-coloured tiles, bright diver meeples – with artwork provided by Dennis Lohausen. But does the gameplay match up to the aesthetic? We think it does, but you’ll have to play for yourself to see if you agree. So how does it play?
Despite being a game based around marine science and conservation, it’s not chunky with lots of different things to keep track of like others in the genre such as Ark Nova (Feuerland Spiele/Capstone Games). You start the game with a player board (boat) that has five divers. You have 6 ‘money’ and, when it’s your turn, a choice of one of two possible actions – planting or surfacing.
When you plant, you buy coral tiles, at 1 money unit each, from a shared market (1–4 depending on what’s available and how much money you have) and then either start a new coral bed from one of the free underwater stations - if you have an available diver to do so - or add to a reef you’ve already established and control. Planting is always the first action that every player takes, as the only way to get more money (and points) is by surfacing divers that are on reefs, and they can’t surface if they’re already in the boat!
The surfacing action does three things: firstly, it’ll return as many divers as you’d like to surface to your boat, allowing them to dive again on a subsequent turn to plant a new coral bed; second, you’ll score points correlating to the size of the reef you’ve just left, plus any clownfish that might be present there; finally, you’ll gain money corresponding to the number of divers now on your boat – if you’ve got one diver it’s 2, if you have all five it’s 8.
It’s not just surfacing divers that gets you points tho', as each underwater station has a higher and lower points value which get scored once the eight spaces surrounding it have been occupied, much like the monasteries in Carcassonne (Hans im Glück) but with a twist. The player with the greatest number of coral tiles in reefs adjacent to the station (orthogonally and diagonally) will score the higher value, and the player with the second most will score the lower value.
The last variable in the base game is shell tiles. There are eight different types of shell that are placed randomly onto specific shell colony spaces on the board, each of which give the player who claims them a different ability. Some allow you to place extra things onto the board, some give money, some give points; all can be valuable if used wisely, and if you have any unused shells in front of you at game end they’re usually worth at least 1 point each.
Ultimately, Reef Gardens is a game of area control and resource management, and deciding when and which diver(s) to surface can be key to victory. Surface a diver from the wrong reef and you could be giving ‘ownership’ of an underwater station to another player (any reef you abandon becomes neutral territory), forfeiting yourself as much as 12 points later in the game. However, if you have no money then you have no choice but to surface one or more divers so that you can buy more coral on your next turn. In our plays we’ve found that being able to maintain control of a sizeable reef that borders a number of different underwater stations across the board is an effective way of securing lots of points, sometimes scoring a quarter of the total points for the winning player in a single turn.
In general we’d recommend this game to anyone who has an interest in the theme and likes the core game mechanics, as there’s different modes of play depending on player count (a smaller grid on one side for two players; a larger grid on the other for 3-4 players) and an optional ‘Atoll’ version that limits the types of reefs that can border door spaces on underwater stations, making coral placement that bit trickier. There are, tho', a few things that are less than optimal about the game that we felt were only fair to share. Having the shells is a great way of introducing variability into the game but the fact that there are so many types can make it confusing to keep track of. In our plays at Board's Eye View, there were several occasions when players forgot to take advantage of certain shells.
Additionally, in the end game you could be in a position where you’re forced to do something you don’t want to, as the game only ends once all the coral in the market has been bought. You may end up buying coral you can’t use - and therefore sacrificing points - or surfacing a diver that than loses you majority control of an underwater station, or leaving neutral coral that another player could claim, thus giving them more points.
We’ve said that the game feels vibrant, and if you want something that has strong visual appeal this will certainly stand out on the table. However, in comparison to a lot of games out there, we feel that a little more could have been done to help those with visual impairments; we wonder if the differences between each coral tile (aside from the colour) are enough to make them completely distinct from each other, and some of the iconography on the shell tiles is quite visually similar too.
All in all, Reef Gardens is a fun light-to-middle weight game that works well at each player count and may even inspire you to want to get in the ocean for real!
*Wetsuit & SCUBA gear not included, and also not actually necessary… unless you really want to wear it!
(Review by Andy Page)
