Vicious Gardens is a malicious, set-building, gardening showdown

Race to grow and harvest from your garden all while trying to outmanoeuvre other gardeners in Vicious Gardens.

Vicious Gardens challenges players to quickly build sets of plants in order to fulfil orders, however the same plants that allow you to do so also allow you to hire specialists, which are dangerous action cards that allow you to move around cards and change the pace and direction of the entire game.

Now, that might make specialists seem simply too disruptive, or powerful, to be accessible at almost all points — and, they are available almost all the time — but this is cleverly balanced out by the ease at which you can obtain and deploy plants. That’s because turns are quick and simple, making this (incredibly cool looking) medium-difficulty SOUNDING game almost a warm-up game when it comes to complexity. In fact, Vicious Garden‘s set up is perhaps the most complicated part… and it’s not that complicated.

For set up, you place the central board in place. It includes seven spots: A space for the plants deck (and a place for the discard — Compost — deck); A space for the specialists deck (and a place for the discard — Retired — deck), two slots for the victory cards and a space for the End of Season Token. As such, there are three decks: Plants, Specialist and Victory decks. You shuffle each up, place them down and then split the Victory cards (task up) across the two spaces. The End of Season Token is kept in place right up until a player has three victory cards, at which case it becomes a marker to indicate it’s the final round.

Each player draws three cards from the plants deck and two from the specialist deck, however this is the only time their hand needs to be like this and at the end of their turn they can draw back up to their hand limit from either pile as and how they wish (unless other conditions come into play through specialists).

On your turn you can play any and all of your plant cards, which must be put into one of four columns in front of you — representing Fruit, Produce, Flower or Herb — which they can then instantly submit for harvest or use to hire a specialist. There are some special cards in the draw piles which include buffs, wild cards and nerfs, they follow the same rules as the plants.

That’s really all there is to it, some specialists move things around, restructure turns or even allow players to switch around victory cards (which have powerful positive or negative modifiers on the back). When it comes to scoring, unharvested plants are worth one — more if you have a bird bath in place — point, victory cards are worth eight and there’s some extra points to be earned by being the player who triggers the endgame by securing their third victory card.

Anyway, anyway; Rules, rules, rules. Vicious Gardens is absolutely beautiful, all of the artwork and iconography is fantastic — even the manual is constructed to imitate an almanac. I love the clever use of fonts and the puns that populate every pocket of (non-instructional) text. The manual appears daunting as a six page document, but barely a page of that is instructions, and it’s incredibly carefully written and constructed. I can’t begin to state how refreshing it is to have a clear manual in a board game — instructions are genuinely the worst bit about board gaming in 2025 and the Vicious Gardens team have really bucked the trend with the instructions quality matching the phenomenal artwork.

Vicious Gardens is available now from Zatu Games