Arboretum: Murder in the Woods
a nifty card game of natural selective back stabbing
Box Art
Publisher : Renegade Games Studios Created By: Dan Cassar
I love simple, small card games. In a way they tend to be the easiest to bring to the table, the safest to introduce to non-gamers, and generally the ones that travel best. If you need something to whet the appetite before a long, heavy Euro, there are card games that are mechanically simplistic, but offer a satisfactory cranial burn in the ilk of, say, Jaipur. You can fill an entire gaming night with such types of entertainment because they offer a wide range of mechanical tastes; trick-taking, set collection, drafting, deck building…you get the point. If there is a card to flip and a mechanic to flip it, go for a card game.
When I want to flip a card to reveal its purpose in my hand, no game as of yet comes close to a balance of hand management quite like Arboretum. With every card drawn a heavy decision has to be made that can create or crash your chances of winning. There is a reason I call it murder in the woods. Arboretum will betray you by its pleasant, quaint façade of carefully selected arboreal aesthetic. Oh no, this game is mean. The sooner you realize the better you’ll come ahead.
Why does a game with delightful tree art create such a great deal of consternation? Well, I’ll get to that in just a few paragraphs below. For starters, what is Arboretum?
A walk in the park
Box, Rule Book, Scoring Pad, Tray with Sleeved Cards
Stored in the box is a deck consisting of 80 cards divided by ten suits. That’s pretty much it aside from the rule book, score sheets and a container. These ten suits are named after trees that adorn each card face: Blue Spruce, Cassia, Cherry Blossom, Dogwood, Jacaranda, Maple, Oak, Royal Poinciana, Tulip Poplar and Willow. Each tree is color-coded and marked by it’s specific suit icon. The art is clean, elegant even. It feels as if it comes straight from the pages of a fancy pocket booklet used to identify species on your forest hike. It’s also very legible. You won’t be confusing trees or wondering, even from afar, what type of tree card you or your opponent might have.
You play with a set amount of suits depending on the player count. Six suits for a game of 2, eight suits for a game of 3 and all ten suits for a game of 4 players. Shuffle the deck, and each player receives seven cards. You will be using these cards, as the game progresses, to create a tableau in front of you.
Two Player Set-up
What will you be building exactly with that tableau? Here is where we start getting to the root of the puzzle. The reason why picking up and setting down cards will lead us to a path of points, and hopefully victory—and it’s dead simple to do. The main action that all players do is pick up two cards, from any draw pile—your own, your opponents or the central deck—and set down two cards. The cards that are being set down, however, go to different places. One, the unwanted, goes to your personal discard pile, while the other is set down in front of you creating and weaving a path that you can later claim for points.
To do that, your first order of business is understanding what you have in your starting hand and determining what, if anything, has the opportunity to create a path in your tableau. See, in order to create a path, you must set down cards in ascending numerical order onto your tableau. They don’t all have to be the same suit, but they at least have to have a logical path in increasing value—2,4,5,7,8—and must begin and end with the same suit in some orthogonal order. You score bonus points if it begins and/or ends with a 1 or an 8, and even more points if the entire path is made from the same tree suit and has at least four cards in the path.
Round and round you go, picking up and setting down until all cards from the central deck are exhausted. The winner is determined by the points accumulated from each player’s path. The one with the most points wins.
But there’s a dastardly catch.
In order to collect those points you must first have the right to score them.
lets get into the weeds
A Finished Tableau
Arboretum is deceptive. At first the indication that setting down cards and scoring them is the bare minimum to win the game. If left at that, sure, but there wouldn’t be much of a game to keep you coming back for more. Where the real cleverness that elevates Arboretum from kindly to killer is the right to score points. It’s simple enough, really. After all the cards on the communal deck have been exhausted, you will have seven cards left in your hand. At first, it might seem a wasted opportunity to score more points from longer paths, but these seven cards allow you to keep different types of suits. The suits you keep will be the only way to score points from the paths you built in your tableau. Have a 5 of oaks in you hand and you have the ability to score any oak path on your tableau.
But wait, say you have that 5 of oaks, but your opponent has the 6 of oaks in their hand? Well, watch your path of oaks burn up as kindle in a raging forest fire. You have lost the right to score. That’s right, no matter how carefully you manicured that oak path, if you don’t hold at least one higher oak card than your opponent, you haven’t done anything to hold the right to score said path. This also works if you happen to have the 4 and 5 of a suit as the combo would be higher than say a 6. The 8 of any suit trumps any combined value lower than an 8, except if your opponent holds onto the 1 of that suit, then you’ll have a bad day, as the 8 is totally negated by that 1 making that 8 a 0.
At once, that simple rule creates a weird love/hate relationship with whatever cards you hold in your hand. Where once you see your tableau as an open field with endless possibilities, as the game wears on, your hand then becomes a constant source of panic, constricting your paths ability to score more as you withhold cards in your hand to counter anything your opponent could be holding to cancel your right to score.
And you’ll be doing the same thing. What happens then is this constant check of what they might be doing on their tableau. Are they building up cherry blossom? Why did they pick up that jacaranda? Oh, wait, has the 7 of cassia been picked up? ARRRGHHH!! There is a weird balance held within those seven cards in your hand. It's a wood chipper, placing limits on what and where to invest in, yet pushes you to pursue suits in order to extend the value of your path…all for it to go bust if you can’t come up with the right amount to withhold by game’s end.
It’s a satisfyingly stressful mechanic, and it’s what makes Arboretum so enjoyable.
savage garden
Arboretum loves to tease you. At first glance you could mistake this game as being one with nature. But just like the real world, nature is fickle. It cares not if you survive or perish. Arboretum is such a game. Go on, make a beautiful path with all the cards of the same suit, but miss one card that ends up in your opponents hand and it's as if it never existed.
Thus, the real treat of Arboretum is in the nuanced, thought provoking decisions that have to be made. What path to make? How many points I’m I willing to give up to complete my path with different suits? Will I have the chance to grab certain cards to keep my opponent from scoring? Every draw of the card invites a new decision that pulls you in different directions. And it’s amazing when all those decisions actually come together in the end allowing you to bust out massive amount of points while simultaneously denying everything to your opponent.
I’ve been on the end of that scenario on both sides of the coin—and truth be told, it’s still fun to see such an outcome. I can appreciate that planning and ruthlessness pulled on me.
So in summary, should you get Arboretum? Without a doubt. It’s a small box game. It’s affordable. It’s an easy enough teach to new players and non-gamers. It scales wonderfully from to 2 up to 4 players and it’s interesting enough to play multiple times in one sitting.
No doubt, this is one of my favorite card games. A welcomed addition to anyone’s library.
To Consider:
+ Works great as a 2-player and scales well to 3 and 4 player counts
+ Easy to learn and teach
+ Tray allows for cards to be sleeved (59x92)
+/- Has some “take that” elements
- Table space is needed as tableaus grow with four players
