Botanicus

In Botanicus you are gardeners growing flowers in your own gardens. You have your own player board and you do your best to create the most beautiful garden. 

This is the player board. You have a gardener pawn which moves about the garden. You can only plant flowers or water them at the four plots next to the gardener, so expect the gardener will need to move about a lot. Every movement costs $1, and money is tight in this game. On the right side of every row there are two missions. If you have the specific combination of flower types in that row, you fulfil the mission and score points. Flowers can be divided into four stages. Yellow is seedling, and as the flower grows, it progresses to pink, green and eventually blue. When you get to plant a new flower, it is usually a seedling (yellow). Sometimes you get to plant pink or green. When you water a flower, it grows to the next stage. 

This is the main board. Every player has a flower shaped token. The bottom half of the board consists of worker placement spots. You place your token here to perform actions. In the first round, you place your token in the first column, and thereafter for each subsequent round you always move to the next column. If a spot has been claimed by another player you can still put your token on top of theirs and perform the same action. However, this costs you $3 per token you top. This is an expensive thing to do. How you place your token in the current column determines the turn order for the next round. Generally the lower spots are stronger than the higher ones, but if you take the stronger spots, next round you go later in turn order. 

In the top half of the main board there are three tracks. Everyone has a progress marker at each track. One track is mainly for making money, another is for watering flowers, and the last is for planting flowers. When you choose a worker placement spot, you often get to advance your progress marker on one of these tracks. You perform the actions specified at the place you stop. You can choose to advance a shorter distance than allowed. By doing this you earn some money. You can also choose to advance further than permitted. To do this you must pay extra. For all three tracks when your marker reaches the end, you score a bonus before resetting your marker. The earlier you reach the end, the bigger the bonus. The bonus devalues as more and more people reach the end. 

Money bag, wheelbarrow and shovel are the icons for the three tracks. 

Another thing you can do is to collect animals. I played the basic game, and when you collect animals, you just score points. In the advanced game, animals have various functions and help you in different ways. On the player board, the rows are for completing missions. The columns matter as well. Every completed column will score points based on the most valuable flower in the column. 

This is a pleasant game to play. Every turn you do one small thing, but step by step you are making progress on several projects. It is generally a peaceful game. You don't mess with others' gardens. At most you can scoff, but please don't do that. That's not nice. There is some competition on the main board. You somewhat race on the three tracks, because whoever gets to the end earlier does receive a bigger bonus. You compete for the worker placement spots. Technically you can use the same spot taken by someone else, but the $3 payment is steep. Also at some spots there is a benefit available only to the first player to place a token. Botanicus is a soothing family strategy game.