Vadoran Gardens First Impressions

In Vadoran Gardens you’re building a path of different terrains across the table.

Look out for lost items and remember your lessons!

Attention Acolytes! Old V’Sheel, the High Priestess of the Vadoran Gardens is retiring, and maybe one of you will take her place. Go out into the gardens, study her lessons in Life, Nature, and Wisdom to prove yourself worthy of such an honor.

Vadoran Gardens Summary

The clear comparisons here are to Kingdomino and Queendomino.

Purely due to the way it looks rather than anything else. Well, you’re connecting terrain pieces too I guess in order to score points.

Visually they’re quite similar. But placing Dominoes next to each other is easier and tidier than overlapping cards.

This overlapping of cards with boxes also reminded me of Honshu, another game I like quite a bit.

So you’re playing cards to build a path like the one above.

The Lessons you have to follow are like rules. Rules not only control the fun but also give you something to think about.

You already have to think about scoring opportunities. The Lessons restrict the cards you have available to do that. The placement rules also make drafting cards more difficult.

You might draft the perfect card only to find you need to play it upside down. However, future lessons are visible so you should see them coming.

The game is good. The art is nice there is variability in the scoring and the order of the Lessons is good too. Changes things up.

The issue is that it’s not as interesting as Kingdomino really. It’s good fun, but I don’t know if I’d ever want to play it ahead of any other similar-weight games.

Don’t let my thoughts put you off though. It is a good game, it’s just one of many many options available and wouldn’t float back to the top of my ‘to-play’ list.

Jesta ThaRogue