Tea Garden

Tea Garden is a medium-weight euro-style game by Tomáš Holek. Tomáš is technically a debuting author, but at this year’s Spiel he’ll introduce three of his designs – Tea Garden one of them, the other two being SETI from Czech Games Edition and Galileo Galileo from Pink Troubadour. It might be a first time that someone is debuting with three complex strategic games simultaneously.

Tea Garden is for 2 to 4 players of age 12 and up with a play time around 90 minutes. It takes you on a journey back to the early days of tea cultivation in ancient China. The basic gameplay mechanism is deck-building. With their cards the players will perform a variety of actions that will allow them to collect victory points. However, one of the most interesting parts is the management of tea leaves themselves (they serve as one of the game’s resources): divided into fresh and fermented - and while the fresh ones lose quality at the end of each round, the fermented ones gain it.