In Garden Heist players race to rack up points by sneaking up the board in a clever twist on hide and seek.
While I’m almost 100% certain that somebody has made a wargaming-style game that adapts hide and seek to the table, after all, they often deal with cover and lines of sight, I think that Garden Heist has to be the purest adaptation of that classic kids game. It adapts it in a fantastic way too, with a theme of racoons thieving their way through a suburban garden.
In it, two-to-four players take on the role of scrappy little racoons who are racing to steal the most, presumably, food. You’ll earn food by either ending the ‘Search’ phase undiscovered behind the yellow-outlined standees on the board, or by successfully stealing the bin from directly under the spotter’s nose. There’s a complication though because players are taking turns as the spotter/seeker, and so there’s actually quite a bit of an opportunity for metagaming. I’ll explain that once we’ve gotten through set-up though.
Set-up is quite involved, but not in the way of larger Eurogames. It’s just that Garden Heist is flush with components to assemble and there’s a lot of cardboard pieces, especially for a game that – by pitch – feels like its age bracket (while wide) starts on the young-side. You’ll assemble and place out 14 standees representing different spaces around the garden, also assembling the house, the garden base and the pathway to the house. It’s all quite elaborate, and extends out about a meter toward the scoring area, which uses small cardboard jig-cut cardboard to track your score. After all this is done you set up the finish line (adjusted for players), the bin at the foot of the house, and give each player a meeple and score tracker.
If set up is surprisingly in-depth for a game aimed at younger families, then play is refreshingly simple. Players take turns being the spotter at the end of the board (behind the house) while players move up the board toward the bin, one move per turn. For the first round, players can pick any of the spaces on the first row to place their racoon behind, and if they’re not spotted during the spotting phase then they can — should they choose — move up to the second row (and on, and on) on their next round. The rules give a short phrase to be read out to define the time that players get to move, however there’s no reason why this couldn’t be longer or shorter to adapt for players.
Once everybody has moved, or the short phrase has been fully read, the player within the house flips open the blinder and looks through the window of the house to try and spot racoons. They get to guess at one place on the board to be removed and send all racoons there back to the start for their next turn. Yellow spaces tend to be slightly lumpier or even have holes in them, making them harder to hide behind. That and players who are hidden behind a yellow space must act as if they are cleaning their paws during the guessing stage. If they do manage to survive this phase then they get a point toward winning, and if the spotter spots anybody then they get one too. If somebody manages to steal the bin directly by the house then they get more points; and if they can do it twice in a row then they’ve normally won as a result of their daring-do.
The meta-gaming is, of course, that as the ‘spotter’ role rotates, you’re often aware of where other racoons are littered around the board. If somebody, on the previous turn, gets right up to the row before the bin, and you’re ‘seeking’ next, then you know that they’re going to be in the frontmost row, and in line for a lot of points if you don’t catch them. This adds a really clever dynamic that simply doesn’t have an opportunity to appear in other board games, a kind of accidental ‘traitor’ insight that feels quite fun and amps the feelings that come with catching or being caught.
While it takes up a lot of space on the table, Garden Heist does a lot of clever things that other board games don’t — deliberately or not.
Garden Heist is available now from Amazon.
