Tea Garden Board Game Review

Written by Chris Marling

When I started in the hobby some 20 years ago, most of the games I fell in love with were beige and German. While I look upon many of the changes since with a tutting old-timer mentality (here’s looking at you, Kickstarter), I do love how the steady diet of historical city euros has morphed into a smorgasbord of colourful offerings with every theme you could think of. Tea Garden falls nicely into this category, filling the table with bright colours while delivering a classic Feld-like point salady euro game experience.

As with many recent mid-weight games, Tea Garden looks to iterate on, rather than reinvent, the wheel.

How to play Tea Garden Game

Fans of the genre will find a familiar mix of light deck-building, action selection, and resource management elements to get their teeth into, alongside enough ways to score points to keep you coming back for a good number of plays.

This is because it is also a game about making the most of what you’ve got and what’s available on your turns, rather than allowing you to pre-plan from the get-go. Sure, you can strategise; but you’ll often find the need to pivot tactically as your first-choice options dry up.

Structurally the game lasts five rounds, each of which sees players take between one and four turns plus a bunch of free actions and bonus effects. Each player starts with an identical set of action cards and can buy new, stronger cards throughout the game. Each card has a strength, while most also have a kettle symbol, a bonus action, or both. You draw four cards each round, but can also save cards and immediately use any you buy.

You can use multiple cards as one action (combining their strength), but only the top card’s bonuses count. You can use your cards to play one to four actions each round, giving you maximum flexibility. 

Actions allow you to generate and sell tea, buy cards, and move up tracks to earn victory points and other bonuses. The tea system is another of the game’s strengths. It has six strengths, plus a fresh and ripened side to each token. Ripening tea takes valuable actions but is required for some of the better actions and, at the end of each round, fresh tea decreases its level while ripened tea improves.

The game doesn’t get more complex as the rounds tick by, but there’s a noticeable and satisfying game arc plus regular combo-tastic moments that give that dopamine hit of accomplishment, regardless of whether you pull off the victory.  

The test Tea Garden fails hardest is interaction. There’s a small element of competition for cards and board spaces but it is a largely multiplayer solitaire affair.  And, however nicely the various parts mesh together, this is another exercise in juggling many of the same euro game tropes we’ve seen before. The board is colourful, the art style is minimalist and unlikely to win any awards, while the overall lack of variety in actions as well as in art isn’t going to win over fans of more complex titles.

Tea Garden Board Game Verdict

But I love this openness. While restrained, I always feel the game is trying hard to let me do what I want. Want to save a card for the next turn? Sure thing. Fancy doing one real big action or a bunch of little ones? Go for it. But everyone else is in the same boat, so I still need to be the most efficient to win. It’s hard to get this restraint/freedom balance right but Tea Garden does it beautifully, ultimately making it an absolute keeper for me. 

You should play this game. It's an elegant euro game with multiple paths to victory, it is perfect for those who enjoy a personal puzzle over intense player interaction.

About Tea Garden

Designer: Tomáš Holek

Publisher: Albi

Time: 90m

Players: 2-4

Ages: 12+

Price: £60

What’s in the box?

• Game board
• 4 Player boards
• 69 Wooden pieces
• 145 Cards
• 228 Cardboard Tokens