In the hushed intimacy of her laboratory, the eminent researcher Beatrix Bury has just discovered a technology allowing to mechanically generate all kinds of edibles. Subtropical plants, stellar potatoes, Orion mandarins, this new technology opens a way to save the people of Forharms, prisoners of a world made of rust and toxic vapors. It’s in the urgency of a threatened world that the scientist puts two of her best teams in charge of developing her plan... that can seem quite demanding at times. Each team is engrossed in its mission and Beatrix’s laboratory becomes the battlefield of fierce competition to produce the best performing machine. You are promoted to the head of one of these two teams, and must prove yourself worthy of the head researchers’ trust. Rise up to the challenge!
—description from the rulebook
Develop the most effective network of mecha-botanics, the combination of plants and science! Botanik offers fluid mechanics (one action per turn), in addition to an ingenious exchange system, associated with tiles of different groups/colours.
A)draft machine parts (tiles)and add them to your workshop
or
B)change the main workshop to add tiles from your workshop to your machine.
Gain points for 1)groups of 3 or more tiles of the same color and 2)for flowers on your tiles
- clever, low-overhead yet deep strategy
- beautiful industrial aesthetic with flowers
- tight and interactive without heavy rules
- can feel mean when you block a key tile for your opponent
- may require careful planning to maximize pipe/flower connections
- garden design and pipe-work in a staged garden
- Two-player tile-placement with botanical and piping imagery
- quiet, elegant strategy with a subtle competitive edge
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- shared drafting — Tiles are drafted from a common pool, and players influence each other's options.
- tile placement — Draft and place square tiles featuring pipes and flowers to connect color groups.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- it's a date night classic for us
- Escape rooms in a box
- it's such a beautiful like calm game
- it's a terrific tile placement game
- this is the heaviest of all of the games on this list
- it's a two-player only game
- it's meanest game on this list
- it's a modern classic
- Bandido is slippery