Grove – a solo review

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. But when life gives you limes and oranges as well, it might be best to put dice on them instead. Because Grove doesn’t just give you lemons – it gives you limes and oranges too, and a squirrel, and a wheelbarrow, and two goals you need to achieve. So don’t let life get you down; you’ve got a grove to tend to!

Name: Grove: a 9-card solitaire game (2021)
Designer: Mark Tuck
Publisher: Side Room Games, White Goblin Games (NL)
Play type: tile placement, pattern matching

What the game is about

How much juicy fruit can your produce in your grove? In Grove, you will be drawing and playing cards onto your tableau in order to match fruit types (colors) and increase the appropriate dice values to try and set the highest score.

How the game works

Grove is the spiritual successor to Orchard, by the same designer and publisher. The game components comprise nothing more than 18 cards and a few dice in three colours, a squirrel, and a wheelbarrow token. To play a game, you shuffle the deck, take a pile of 9 cards, place a random one face up, and draw a hand of two cards. Every turn, you play a card and draw a card until all 9 cards have been placed.

Every card contains a 2*3 grid of five fruit symbols – lime, lemon, and orange – and one empty square. When you place a card (partly) onto an existing card, you place a die on every square that matches the fruit of the one directly below it. If there was already a die there, you tick it up. When you cannot uptick a die anymore, you place the wheelbarrow, which is worth 15 points at the end of the game.

There are a few caveats. First, when you ‘mismatch’ a symbol, you place the squirrel there instead. It removes a die (if any) below it, and is worth minus points at the end of the game. Secondly, if you ever run out of dice of a certain color, you no longer gain those when you play a card.

At the end of the game, you add up all your accumulated dice values, the wheelbarrow’s 15 points (if in play), and any negative points from the squirrel (if in play). There is an advanced variant where you randomly draw two cards from the 9 unused cards to give you another way to score points; recipes, printed on the back of each card. The extra scoring option comes with a price, though – a scoring threshold you need to reach in order to call yourself a winner.

Theme, setting & narrative

Make no mistake – Grove is a challenging puzzle game that strips away most of its theme once you start playing. I do like how they managed to elaborate on the theme of Orchard and give it a different look and feel. New fruits, new colours, and even new tokens like the wheelbarrow and squirrel, all of a surprising quality given the small box. Bonus points for having PVC cards, so I don’t have to sleeve the cards and I can still fit them into the travel-friendly box without wear!

How does it play?

Grove is a spatial puzzle game that rewards spatial awareness as well as forward-thinking. Yet it does so in a way that doesn’t leave you feeling like a total noob (not until you see your final score, at least). What I mean by this is that there is always something to do, even if it’s only to match one or two squares. Your final score might be nothing to write home about, but at least you’ve had your fun, and you might have learned something to take away for future games.

It is hard to look at this game in a vacuum; more specifically, it’s hard not to draw comparisons when it is clear Grove is the offspring (fruit, if you will) of Orchard. When looking at the cards themselves, you can see both comparisons and similarities. Especially the difference stands out – Grove‘s 5 fruit symbols and 1 glade as opposed to Orchard‘s 6 symbols. The glades are the game changer here. At first sight, they make placing cards less restrictive, making it easier to work towards placing more dice off of future cards. However, it’s no coincidence Grove has just 1 negative token as opposed to Orchard‘s 2; the flip side is that glade spaces really force you to think ahead about how to get the most out of your cards. in that sense, Orchard at least offered the opportunity to forego two spaces, taking 3 penalty points each. Grove only hands you one such possibility, keeping games full of meaningful choices.

It’s amazing how changing a few minor elements can make something feel entirely different, from one iteration to the next. Sure, Orchard and Grove are still visibly and mechanically connected, but everything that Grove does differently makes it feel altogether like a new and fresh experience. The biggest two changes are the recipes and the wheelbarrow; two minor variants are the squirrel and the die values. Let’s go over them one at a time.

Every card is double-sided, the back displaying a recipe that holds an additional scoring condition as well as a scoring threshold. Needless to say, this not only makes the game more challenging, but for me at least, it provides more longevity since it elevates the game beyond a beat-your-own-score exercise.

The wheelbarrow is an alternative way to score extra points; the first time you would level up a die but can’t, you replace it with the wheelbarrow token that’s worth 15 points at the end. This also frees up another die; since the resources are limited in this game, getting a die back could translate to some bonus points down the line. That brings me to the die values too; where Orchard went 1-3-6-10, Grove‘s leveling steps are 2-3-4-5-6-10. In Orchard, every match caused the die to uptick by one, whereas in Grove, you add up the values and adjust the die accordingly. When it would exceed 6, it goes to 10 instead, which is when only the wheelbarrow can score you more points there.

And finally, we have a singular squirrel instead of two worms. The worms were two ‘freebies’ in Orchard that allowed you to place a card and mismatch one fruit symbol at the cost of three points. The squirrel does a similar thing, but its penalty fluctuates. It’s -1 regardless, but it’s another -1 for each adjacent die. This rule turns what was a fixed penalty into a malleable one; a small penalty you accept beforehand, but one that you can prevent from getting out of hand by taking care of what you place around it. But of course, you also have to remember that now you only have one squirrel (instead of two worms).

While it’s hard for me to review this game out of context, I can state the following without any comparison whatsoever – Grove is a quick game to get to the table, a game you can play in barely a few minutes, and a game you can easily reset to try again. Given the amount of decision-making it packs into its short playtime, that is perhaps its most significant feat.

What you might like

• PVC cards and its pocket size make Grove extremely travel-friendly
• easy to get into card laying, with deep decisions underneath once you get a grasp on strategy and tactics
• more challenging than its predecessor, yet also more forgiving – playing this is like relearning to ride a bike
• the wheelbarrow adds an extra challenge; recipes add a win-loss scoring threshold on top of that, too
• leveraging the squirrel is something to master in order to make its disadvantages nil or even advantageous
• quick to set up, quick to play, and quick to reset and play again
• an excellent time-for-value ratio

What you might not like

• manipulating the dice and the cards can be fiddly at times
• it’s too bad this game came out after Orchard because it pretty much obsoleted that one for me!

Expansion

Did you know Grove is the spiritual successor to Orchard? If it wasn’t for my 37 times referencing this fact you might have missed it. While I was writing this review, news came in that there is a third game coming up to round out what is apparently a trilogy called Forage. It looks to mix and match the mechanisms of its predecessors while adding new wrinkles of its own. A new crowdfunding campaign should launch soon-ish. It will also have a nice case to hold all three games. As a fan of both Orchard and (spoiler) Grove, this is a must-have for me. I welcome the storage solution, too!

Conclusion

Grove manages to present a quick puzzly experience that is both more challenging than Orchard, but also more exciting and a little less restrictive. Orchard already had a great value-for-money-and-time-investment ratio, but Grove one-ups it, just like pretty much all other factors. There is a tad more going on in Grove, but even with the advanced rules of adding recipes, the rules are still easy to grasp, yet provide a fair challenge for new players and veterans alike. If you like games to slip into your backpack, suitcase, or purse, definitely consider the puzzly experience that is Grove. And if you already like Orchard, then why are you still reading this?

Rating: ★★★★★

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