Arboretum is a really strange game that it is more interesting to think about when you’re not playing it than when you are. Then it’s just kinda annoying. It’s a confusing situation. I mean, I think this is a good game; all signs point to it being one, at least. It has simple rules, a smooth cadence, and a surprising amount of depth for a “filler” (a word best used in quotes). In a lot of ways it’s a difficult game to criticize, or at least to find the right words to do so. Nevertheless, a cursory look through some forum discussions reveals that it’s a surprisingly divisive title with many players passionately opining both for and against it — something quite atypical for lighter weight card games. So why exactly is Arboretum, a colorful game about building relaxing paths through resplendent trees, a game that some love and others revile? Well, seeing as I fall right in the middle of those two categories, perhaps I am the right man to answer that very question.
As mentioned before, Arboretum‘s ruleset is quite simple. In fact, the “How To Play” section of the rulebook is a full two pages shorter than the sections on scoring. Shuffle a deck of cards with 6-10 suits of trees on them depending on player count, deal seven to each player, and put what’s left in the center of the table. Cards are ranked 1-8 indicating their value, and there is one card of each rank for every suit. On their turn a player draws two cards, plays one, and discards one. They may draw from the draw deck or from any player’s discard pile. Cards are played into a personal tableau that is not constrained by any boundaries or shape limitations besides the standard rule of orthogonal adjacency. The player’s goal is to create paths of trees of ascending value that begin and end with trees of the same suit — “Maple” or “Oak” or what have you. Paths can be forward, backward, upward, downward, perfectly straight, or filled with all manner of zigs and zags, and they score points based on the number of cards in them plus bonuses for containing the 1 or 8 ranks or being comprised entirely of the same suit (as long as the path is of a certain length). While spatial orientation does not affect their individual point value, clever arborists will be able to utilize the same cards in multiple paths and thus maximize their scoring potential.
There is a kicker to the way scoring works in Arboretum, however, and that is you have to earn the right to score your paths by leaving cards in your hand that match the suit in the paths you’d like to score. For example, lets say two different players want to score paths that begin and end with Maple trees. During end-game scoring, the players must first compare the Maple cards they still have in their hands and only the player with the higher total value will get to score their Maple path. You don’t even need to have a Maple path, you can just collect high-value cards of all the trees to stop other players from scoring them like a real jerk. To make matters even more “Take That!”-y, 1-ranks cancel 8-ranks of the same suit and reduce their hand value to zero. This earning-the-right-to-score idea is the primary element that gives Arboretum its unique flavor, for better or worse, and its something I personally have mixed feelings about. It’s definitely a cool idea, but it would work a lot better in a more thematic game where the reasoning behind its implementation doesn’t feel so arbitrary. Here, it’s a tad obnoxious. Choosing between using a card to score and using it to earn the right to score the same thing it would be scored as part of is a super weird idea (just reading back that sentence hurts my brain). An unorthodox mechanism such as this really needs a solid thematic explanation to be expected to sit in your brain properly, but since Arboretum is essentially an abstract there’s no luck with that here.
Due to the way player hands can block each other from scoring, a large constituent of success in Arboretum is keeping track of the locations of as many cards in the deck as possible. Frankly, I find this more exhausting than fun. Tracking information is a key part of many, if not most, board games, but Arboretum‘s late game is excessively burdened by the need to count cards and go through discard piles to make sure you’ll be able to score the paths you want to score. It’s not an incredible exaggeration to say that the game rewards its players’ willingness to inconvenience the table just as much as it does their strategy or tactics. Because of this, the game is at its best during its first few turns, which feature a plentiful web of risk vs. reward considerations as you determine how best to orient your tableau or which paths to go for. Despite that, the above factors inevitably end up convoluting the decision space, and — partly as a consequence of the game’s brevity — it rarely feels like it’s worth the mental effort to bother trying to play well. Note: I will gladly think my way through a swath of messy, convoluted nonsense if a game provides a grand framework for developing strategies and watching them unfold, but I highly prefer games of a half hour or less to be much more immediate. Note on my note: I said more immediate, not easier.
Now for the part of the review where I take issue with whatever the most common criticism of the game I’m discussing is. In Arboretum‘s case being that it’s “mean”, which is the kind of criticism I wouldn’t even take with a grain of salt. Arboretum‘s “meanness” is the most interesting thing about the game. Tasking players with both building high-value constructions and securing the right to score them is an idea ripe for design iteration. Where the game fails is in its efforts to make such an idea function intuitively with the rest of its system. Better theming, inclusion in a broader strategy game design, or a more forgiving approach to the same core concept are all ways that the same point could’ve been better made. As is, it’s part of a mediocre design that has surprisingly found itself in the position of being a love-it-or-hate-it conversation starter. But hey, I suppose that’s the power of a “filler” game with a decision space that can bring even the least AP-prone players to their knees.
Arboretum gets a rating of THREE out of FIVE, indicating it is WORTHWHILE.