Review: Solar Gardens (Darrington Press)

The city of Solara needs your help! It’s a beautiful place to live, filled with new buildings and all kinds of opportunities — and you can make it even better by turning bland rooftops into stunning gardens.

That’s the premise behind Solar Gardens, a tile drafting game from Darrington Press. Players try to select the best tile each round to expand their growing garden. Do you add more flower beds? Build more wind turbines or solar panels? Or maybe add a walking path so visitors can stroll by your wildlife habitats?

Your rooftop canvas awaits, so grab your tools and roll up your sleeves as we lay out the top five things you need to know about Solar Gardens!

Basking in the Theme

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Solar Gardens presents each player with a square four by four grid of spaces for their tiles. The grid also affects how some of the tiles score (more about that in a moment) and acts as a countdown timer for the game. When you run out of spaces for tiles, you’re done playing!

Your playing space is square because you’re building gardens on top of a skyscraper. It’s a fun explanation that shows the designer’s dedication to the theme. Plus it makes the game feel more immersive by giving players a story to support their work.

Pushing Your Luck

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Before adding a tile to your roof, you need to select it during the Construction phase. The starting player draws one tile face down for each player plus a spare. They stack the tiles and then flip the top one to begin the turn’s draft.

The starting player then decides if they want to play the tile they flipped or pass it to the next player. If they pass the tile, then the second player makes goes through the same choice again, and so on through all players.

If the tile gets to the last player in the turn order, that player can either play it or discard it out of the game, but if they do that then they must play the next tile that comes their way.

Points from Position

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Each tile can contain a mix of features to improve your solar garden. Two features, solar panels and windmills, earn points at the end of the game depending on their position.

To earn points from these, you need at least four wind turbines on the same row or four solar panels on the same column. Each row and column is worth a different number of points ranging from one to four. The top row is worth the most points for wind turbines, and the right-most column scores the most for solar panels.

Beds and Filters

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Flower beds and water filters are your next scoring option. Here, you want to extend the flower beds so they connect across multiple tiles. You also want a border around the beds or to place them along the board’s outside wall (which acts as a natural border).

The final thing your flower beds need is one or two water filters each. An enclosed flower bed with one filter makes each bed tile worth one point; two or more filters makes the tiles worth two points. But what if you didn’t enclose the whole flower bed with a border? Then you lose half the points for the bed, rounded down. (And yes, that can leave you with zero point flower beds at the end of the game!)

Animals, Sculptures, and Paths

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Your final options for scoring points come from animal habitats and sculptures.

The game features five animal habitats to keep your garden healthy and your visitors entertained. If your finished garden has one of each animal habitat anywhere on your board, you earn five points at game end. If you put two more more of the same habitat next to each other orthagonally (in the same column or row, not diagonally), you earn three points for each pair.

You can also dress up your garden with sculptures. These appear either alone of in groups of two or three. Each sculpture in your garden scores one point, so a group automatically gives you either two or three points.

Finally, you can build walking paths for visitors. Your longest continuous path earns one point per tile, plus another three points if your path is the longest on the table.

Verdict

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Solar Gardens adds some fun twists to the classic tile-laying game experience. We especially liked the drafting mechanic and the various point scoring opportunities. Making the solar panels and windmills worth different point values depending on where they are in the board added a nice tension to the tile placement choices.

The game shines with three to five players. It still works for two, but because you’re only working with three tiles each round, we felt it tilted the game’s strategy toward luck over skill. To rebalance that, try drafting four tiles instead of three and letting the second player discard up to two tiles. That increases the number of tiles both players get to see each game.

Darrington also did a great job with the components. The players boards are thick and solid, and the tiles have a great feel to them. Giving each player their own reference card smooths out any issues before they can happen.