In Growing Season by Undigital Atelier, you’re a farmer competing to grow the most profitable farm. Using your deck of tool cards, water and harvest crops to earn money which you’ll use to buy more crops, better tools and upgrade your farm.

In the solo mode, face the evil Natsume corporation who want to build on your land. Event cards are shuffled into the crop deck and when drawn a negative effect is resolved which helps the automa progress, or slows you down.

There’s a variant for 3-4 players which plays slightly differently. This post focuses on 2p and solo.

Every turn you’ll draw a hand of 5 cards from your deck of 15 and use them to water crops and harvest them once fully grown. You’ll generate money when harvesting, but some crops will also allow you to ‘gather’ and gain money as they grow.

Use the money generated to buy more crops and upgrade your tools. When you upgrade a tool, remove its starter version from your discard pile – you will always have a deck of 15 steadily more powerful tool cards.

The tool deck is limited, so there is a race element to upgrade as quickly as possible. There are advanced tools which you can add in after your first game which expand the deck and allow you to both water AND harvest.

While the deck building is important, from experience players roughly upgrade the same amount. Most of the differentiation in strategy is going to come from the upgrades you make to your farm…

Once you’re earning enough money, you can start investing in your farm by paying 10🪙 to gain an upgrade. Your 10🪙 will be placed onto your tracker showing progress towards 100🪙 invested which is the win trigger. 

As well as moving you one step towards victory, farm upgrades are a key step in building your engine. Draw from the 3 cards available and add that upgrade into your farm. 

There isn’t much repetition in the farm upgrades so you’ll need to adapt your strategy each game to work with what’s available to you. 

Upgrading your farm does result in a bit of a snowball effect in the second half of the game, but in my plays so far this has been pretty equal across players and there hasn’t felt like there’s a runaway or clear winner, but I could definitely see this happening. 

There are mining (basic) and fishing (advanced) ‘mini games’ which you can activate when discarding unused cards. These mini games are very simple and – although half the time you don’t win anything! – ensure you rarely feel like you’ve wasted cards from your hand which really adds to the gameplay satisfaction

⛏️ With the mining deck, discard 2 cards to flip one mine card and gain the money revealed

🎣 With the fishing deck, discard 1 card to flip a fishing card. Your tool cards have a fish value; if the revealed fish is a higher value you go bust, but if not you can take the money or discard another card to keep flipping – but careful as if you go bust now you lose everything!

When playing with advanced tool upgrade cards I recommend adding in fishing right away, as I found myself with lots of wasted tools when using mining.

In the solo variant you face the evil Natsume corporation who want to build on your land.

Choose your difficulty level by blocking off the first spaces of the automa’s game tracker and add 7 event cards to the crop deck. These will reveal negative effects to be resolved when they are drawn.

Effects include pesticides killing your crops, a thief stealing your money, hiking the price of upgrades, trashing a farm upgrade, or simply Natsume moving a step up their game track.

If an effect ever can’t take place (the thief comes but you have no money) it goes straight back in the deck. This creates some really interesting choices when you know which events are still in the deck. Do I buy lots of crops risking them being ruined by pesticides? But if I hoard my money they may send a thief! I could invest the money and upgrade my farm, but they could just trash my upgrade!

If the crop deck runs out, or the Natsume corp reach the end of their game tracker before you, you lose.

Verdict

The premise and gameplay are delightfully simple offering a satisfying and addictive experience which would be great as an intro to deck building or a cosy lightweight game. I love that the solo variant is it’s own game distinct from 2p, even if Natsume corp is a little mean!

As a lightweight strategy game (1.91 on BGG) it delivers everything I want – quick gameplay, light rules admin, easy set up, simple solo mode and a genuinely lovely gaming experience. If you’re a fan of Stardew Valley or similar, you will probably adore this. If you regularly play Twilight Imperium, then it’s probably not for you.

A couple of points to consider because pobody is nerfect:

💭 The tool deck runs out fast at 2p creating an interesting race, but removing the decision of when to stop upgrading tools start investing that I think could take the strategy to the next level
💭 No wording on cards keeps them language independent (✅️) but some iconography would be useful as there’s a bit of referring to the rulebook required until you’re familiar with card effects
💭 In solo, event cards can end up stacked towards one end of the deck. There’s a lovely tension not knowing when they’ll crop up (heh!) but I dominated Natsume on one play as only 2 events were in the top half of the deck – and the reverse could just as easily happen, impacting the difficulty level in a way you can’t control

Note that this is a prototype copy of the game loaned to me for review by Undigital Atelier via the UK BG Review Circle and final components will vary.