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Picard: “Tea. Earl Gray. Hot.”
Data: “Captain, this is a game about building tea gardens in the Yunnan region of China. You are building a deck of cards by acquiring higher power cards as you progress. I'm not sure the reference is apt.”
Picard: “Earl Gray is made with leaves that are harvested while green, then fermented. Which is one of the keystones to this release.”
Data: “Or you just a Next Generation fan who wanted to put “Tea. Earl Gray. Hot” into a review.
Tea Garden is played out over five Rounds with three player turns per round. (or four, if you spend tea leaves to take an additional action). You'll use your cards to buy other cards, build tea gardens, sell tea to traders and generally do all things related to producing more tea leaves. I'm sensing a theme here.
The main resource in Tea Garden is obviously tea. You have various “quality” of tea leaves (graded one through six) and they come in two different colors (green and fermented/brown). At the end of a round, green leaves drop one level in quality while brown leaves increase one level. Does this mirror real tea leaf production? Hell if I know, but it makes for a clever mechanic without drowning you in a ton of resources.
You want tracks in your games? Tea Garden has tracks: The Tea University Track (get your bachelor's in brewing), the emperor track, and taking your boat down the river is also a track but decidedly wetter.
You even get to build a personal track off the board using the cup mechanism. All of the tracks are engaging and intriguing with the possible exception of the Cup Production. Linking cups off board is truly a solo experience and relies on good cup's coming out in the areas you have tea gardens. Where you can see how you are ranking on all of the other tracks by simply glancing at the main board, the fact that this is “off to the side” means it is easily ignorable/forgettable, especially in early plays. Even after reminding myself to pay attention to the cups, it never felt like that attention was warranted. Oh! And there are caravan cards, which sound like they would totally be a used on a track, but aren't. They are the primary way you will be earning Victory Points during the game (But, as with most Euro's, the bulk of your points will come via end game goals/conditions).
Tea Garden lets you prune your deck liberally with a variety of powers and cards. This can give you that fear that you are pruning off a card that you might need to blossom later. I, personally, love agonizing decisions like this. And if you are looking for something that leans heavy on the deck building portion, this game does that. Cards you purchase go directly into you hand, which means you can buy a card on the first action of your turn and play it out on the next action. If you come away from a game of Tea Garden with the complaint that you didn't draw the cards you needed during the game, prune harder...and take that Emperor Card that gives 18 Victory Points minus one for every starting card you have remaining in your hand for true inspiration.
If the player ahead of you buys a card, it can lower the point cost of the card you want...or it could be them taking the exact card you wanted, so you will be willing other players to take a specific action or not take a different action. This gives a satisfying bit of off turn engagement that can be missing from other releases of the genre. That's not to say that there is any on-board player interaction other than a light bit of building a tea garden in a area first to snag a few extra victory points and a bonus tile.
Tea Garden never feels too restrictive on taking the actions you want...with the caveat that you might have to sacrifice optimal use of tea leaves or bonus tiles you have at your disposal. In addition to the main actions you can take, you also have secondary action you can trigger with icons on the cards you are playing and even more free actions you can take that involves spending resources you have acquired.
It's not as sexy as SETI or as galaxy-spanning as Galileo Galilei but it has the Holek hook. The secondary action on cards make you feel brilliant when you pull of a combo that makes you think “I couldn't have done that better.” Of course, that makes the game susceptible to procrastination constipation (you may know it by it's more common name: Analysis Paralysis) especially since you can take main actions/secondary actions/free actions in any order and tweaking those just right is a game in itself.
Tea Garden looks gorgeous on the table with screen printed wooden tokens for your workers, your boat and all of the gardens themselves. If we have learned anything from playing decades of Euro's, it that fermented might be good for Tea Leaves but its not the optimal choice for a color palette.
I, personally, really like what Tea Garden does. It has aggressive deck building, a great variety of paths to victory, and I relish how the secondary actions become your primary focus later in the game. However, the multi-player solitaire nature (where you finish a turn, extremely impressed with yourself, but the other players never react because they are working on their own turn) and the pure transactional nature of the gameplay means I would only recommend it to a specific subset of players. If you enjoy mentally chewing on a moderately heavy challenge, this game is the crumpets that goes with your Tea.
A review copy of this release was provided by the publisher. Therewillbe.games would like to thank them for their support.
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