Garden Geckos: Dew Drops and Koi Ponds Overview
When Garden Geckos launched, we had a blast reviewing it as a preview for the Kickstarter campaign. Once again, we are being given a chance to check out the new expansion before it hits Kickstarter, and we are really excited about what this adds to the experience! This one box includes three little expansions that can be folded into your main game, either all together or individually. I’ll quickly run down how each works, and provide a few impressions our group had!
Point-Vendor Market
There is a new way to score points with your bug meeples! 8 Point-Vendor cards are laid out prior to each game, and players can cash in the required bugs to take the corresponding card. These cards are first come, first serve, and are limited. This is a great little addition to the game that takes almost no time to teach and setup, but provides yet another way for players to earn points throughout the game. The limited nature of the cards does provide the opportunity to make some decisions as you choose between other objective cards and these!
Dew Drops and Koi Ponds
A few additional setup rules are required here, with each player getting a dew drop token and a koi pond token during setup. These tokens are wild elements, and can be used to manipulate your strategy and score additional points. When you place a gecko, you can also place a dew drop or a koi pond onto the board.
Dew drops must be placed on top of either of the bugs your gecko touches; the bug with the dew drop now becomes a wild bug, and can be used as anything for the purpose of fulfilling objectives. This is a really great way to snag a card ahead of someone else, or get more points for creating a better connection. Again, it is more decisions, which is never a bad thing! The trick here is that these drew drops are wild for other players as well! Further, when a tile is “completed” players can take the dew drop for use later instead of taking the surrounded matching bug meeple!
Koi Ponds make Garden Geckos a little easier to play, in my opinion, and while there is a lot of strategy in WHEN you should place them, it does make connections much easier to obtain. You can now place a tile that doesn’t have two matching sides, and instead place your koi pond spanning the unmatched tiles to create a wild area.
We’ve enjoyed many games of Garden Geckos over the past year or so, and this expansion is just going to add more to that experience. Garden Geckos is an easy game to teach, and a pretty easy game to understand and play. There is enough strategy here to make it fun for adults, while also being accessible to new board game players and a younger audience. If you haven’t tried Garden Geckos yet, and love puzzle-like tile laying games, this is one you don’t want to miss out on!
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Article By Adam Roffel
