Growing Season is a two-player board game inspired by resource management video games where the player runs a farm; such as the Harvest Moon saga, or the popular indie game Stardew Valley.
Growing Season is an accessible and straightforward game that mixes deck building and resource management. It serves as a perfect introduction to more complex board games, or as a perfect game for quick games on the couch, it doesn’t require much preparation but hides a lot of depth in the optimization of the hands and resources.
A normal game of Growing Season lasts about 35 minutes, during which players will build and grow their farms. Players will start with three plots of land and not much more than the efforts of their farmers, and by the end of the game they will run a huge and automated farm, with which they’ll be able to tackle the most complicated and lucrative crops, using sprinklers, a harvester, and with several barns.
In turns, you will draw 5 cards from your deck of 15, these will be a spread of watering and harvest cards; with the watering cards you can water and grow your crops, and with the harvest cards you can harvest and sell them.
With the money obtained, you will be able to buy more crops from the seed store. You will have avaliable an array of fruits and vegetables with multiple tiers of complexity.
You can buy fast-growing crops, that will generate little money, but will be easily harvested; or needier ones, that will generate lots of money, but will take more time to grow. All the crops that you buy will be placed on one of your empty plots of land in your farm.
If you have money left over (or don’t want to buy more crops), you can upgrade your tools so that the following turns will be more efficient. In order to do this, you can buy the copper, silver or gold tools, offered by the blacksmith, and replace them with one of yours from your discard pile, so that they will appear in the following turns.
If at some point in the game you have cards left over from your hand (due to not having crops to water or harvest, or having drawn a combination that is not useful at that moment), you can go to the mine to make the most of the day, and try to get valuable minerals.
To do this you simply have to discard two cards from your hand, and flip one card from the mining deck. If you struck copper, silver or gold, you’ll gain as much money as the card shows, though you’ll find stones most of the times…
As you start to make a profit, you can improve your farm by adding barns with animals, new plots of land or equipment, such as sprinklers or the harvester.
Animals will generate money every turn, new plots of land will bring bonuses and new equipment will take care of the hard work for you.
At any given time you can invest 10 of your coins to advance on your progression board, getting an uprgade for your farm, and bringing you a little closer to victory. The first farmer who manages to reach 100 coins first wins!
If you’ve come this far, congratulations! You already know how to play Growing Season. As you’ve seen, the rules are quickly explained, and the games last from 30 to 45 minutes once you’ve learned the basics. However, behind this simplicity, there is more depth than meets the eye, with multiple viable game strategies.
Among many strategies, you can focus on livestock to generate lots of money consistently, you may upgrade to the most powerful tools to tackle the most valuable crops early or you can automate the farm and focus on lots of fast-growing crops. There are many strategies in the base game, and if we reach the stretch goals, there will be many more for more experienced players!
Growing Season was born at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. With more free time on my hands it was the perfect time to start giving shape to an idea that had been in my head for a long time: bringing the colorful and cheerful world of farming videogames to cards, in a management game that is accessible to everyone.
The priority has always been simplicity. There are plenty of management games focused on farming, but very few that serve as an introduction to the genre or can offer fast and dynamic gameplay.
The idea with Growing Season was to avoid falling into the management of wood, stone, hay and so many other resources that make up this type of board games. Instead, a single resource: Money. A simple design with easy rules, but with the ability to grow and become more complicated as the game progresses, so that the younger players can play without difficulty and, at the same time, the more experienced ones can find a challenge with enough depth that will keep them playing.
The game mechanics were ready in a couple of months. And after several additional months of fine tuning, while trying to avoid unbalanced strategies, the game foundation was slowly getting solid. There was one thing though: The game was solid, but ugly.
As you can see in the images above, Growing Season started with quick drawings and moved on to sketches of stock images from the web. So given my lack of artistic skills, I contacted Pablo M. Collar for the illustrations and artwork. Those ugly drawings, turn into the amazing amazing illustrations that are today, thanks to his skilled work.
A whole year passed since the idea began to take shape and the factory prototype arrived. In this period of time, it has been tested with dozens of friends, family members and people from a great Discord community. All of this, to ensure that Growing Season was the best version that could be offered.
Eric Rodríguez has been working as a content creator in the world of video games, on YouTube, Twitch and television for 7 years. Eric’s content focuses on video game design, mechanics and analysis, although he also has a strong passion for board games. As his ever-growing collection shows.
Eric’s idea of Growing Season tried to bring the farming videogames experience to the world of board gaming. Along the way, he discovered a new passion in the field of board game design.
Fine Arts graduate, comic author, videogame and board game illustrator, and also a teacher; Pablo Moreno Collar is a jack-of-all-trades.
After illustrating the magnificent comic “Rogues: The Shadow over Gerada“, he was in charge of the brilliant illustrations of Growing Season. From the design of the characters to the box art, and each and every one of the resources used in the game. Without his abilities none of this would have been possible, and he has managed to give light, color and life to Growing Season.
