This is a quick and fun little card game. And who wouldn’t want a treehouse with a water slide, butterfly garden, and laser arcade?
Game 1 first scoring
It’s a pretty easy game to learn. You get a tree and a hand of cards. You choose one of those cards to go on your treehouse and pass your deck clockwise. When you place a room (like a butterfly garden), you have to move your balance marker. This means you can’t just build rooms on the right side of your tree because your tree would fall over! There are only two times you don’t move the balance marker: on levels 3 and 5 you can place a room in the middle of your tree.
Game 1 Final Scoring
After the first level, things can get tricky. Let’s say on level 1 you played an orange room and a blue room. On level 2 you can continue to play orange and blue rooms (if they’re available in the hand you get), or you can play other rooms. If you block your blue room, you can’t play any more blue rooms for the rest of the game. This is because if you already have a room of that color, all rooms of that color have to connect.
Once all cards have been placed or discarded, players get to choose Game Changer Cards. These change how rooms are scored at the end of the round. You don’t have to play with these cards, but it does make things more interesting.
This process if repeated two more times (total of 3 rounds), and the player with the most points wins.
Bonus Cards are an optional element to the game. Everyone gets a bonus card, and if you can build room configurations that match your bonus card, you get bonus points.
We’ve played both with the Bonus Cards and without, and we found that you should really play without the Bonus Cards several times. We played two back to back games, and the second time we added the Bonus Cards. It didn’t work so well. Players were so focused on the Bonus Cards, that they often messed up on the placement of rooms. Either there were balance problems or when it came time for scoring we suddenly noticed that a player had two orange rooms but they weren’t connected! So the Bonus Cards can be a big distraction to new players.
Game 2 – Placement Problems
Game 2 – We noticed one problem and corrected it
Game 2 – Finally corrected the other one
We’ll probably play this game quite a bit (without the Bonus Cards for a while). It’s also great that it’s such a compact game, which means we can easily travel with it. Plus it’s just fun to see what kind of crazy treehouse you can build!
Game 2