Uwe Rosenberg’s Cottage Garden trilogy takes its final walk in Spring Meadow

The trilogy of peaceful puzzle games by Uwe Rosenberg will set out on its last wander through the countryside this summer.

The series began in 2016 with gentle plant-arranging delight Cottage Garden, itself somewhat of a spiritual successor to the designer’s two-player masterpiece Patchwork.

The following year, it was announced that Cottage Garden would serve as the first chapter in a planned triptych of puzzle games, continuing with Indian Summer, which took a diversion through the woods in search of natural treasures such as mushrooms and berries.

The second game saw an evolution of the tile-laying gameplay, too, introducing new mechanics involving arranging holes and covering them with animal tiles.

The third and final instalment will be Spring Meadow, which, confusingly, will be released this summer in July.

As you might’ve guessed, the game is set at the close of winter as the snow melts and plants begin to emerge and follows a similar theme to Indian Summer, with the woodland walk now a mountain hike.

Spring Meadow is described as being the most interactive entry in the series, as players draft and place meadow tiles with holes to create routes and move a signpost around the five-by-five board. When the sign moves to a line with only one tile, the player with the biggest meadow gets a hiking pin – the first to two pins takes the win.

The path-finding is made trickier by the presence of marmot burrows, which must be cleared before they can be covered by tiles.

Up to four people can take the trip together, and it’ll last from 15 minutes to an hour.

The complexity is said to be in the middle of the two previous games, as the familiar core of the series takes on a slightly different form, but the increased interaction between players apparently makes it the most strategic of the bunch.