Three Zoo Games from Japan! - Aqua Garden, Sky Garden & Dino Garden

0:07 Do you consider yourself an avid gardener or do you like watching other people garden and doing their gardening? Well, I like gardening in all the sense. Looking after my plants, gardening in my aquarium, also planning resources, nurturing my strategy, and fertilizing my way to victory in a variety of different Euro games, but that's for another video. Today I'm going to be talking about a specific garden trilogy by Yuchi Beoa. The games are Aqua Garden, Sky Garden, and Dino Garden. I'll be looking at all three games in this massive board game trilogy to see what's the difference between all three, how do they play, and whether either of these three games or all three games are a fit for your board game collection.

0:53 Hi, my name's Danny. I'm an avid modern board gamer from Australia. I love sharing my passion for this hobby with you, my friends, and my family. I guess let the gardening begin. And don't forget to subscribe for more wholesome, amazing board game content. Aqua Garden is the first game in the Garden Trilogy. In fact, this is the entry point game into the other two games. It's the easiest one to learn. It's really quick to teach. It looks visually stunning as well as inviting. And once you know the mechanics and the basic system of uh Aqua Garden, you can apply this knowledge to the other two games and dive into those relatively easily. Now, Aqua Garden's been around for a while. In fact, I've owned Aqua Garden for quite some time, and I absolutely love it. And I love uh the size of the box, too. Aqua Garden is basically a game where players are going to be moving along this market track.

1:55 They're going to be taking different species of uh sea creatures and placing them in one of their six tanks on their playerboard. Now, if you've played games like parks or patchwork, this is a game where if you are the last or the player that's furthest behind, you get the next turn. And wherever you stop, you actually get to take that little uh sea creature and then put it next to your board. Then you'll be moving your little employee, which is on a secondary rondelle on your little playmat. And that employee is going to move one to three space. And if you want to move and extend beyond that, you got to pay a little bit of money. And wherever the employee lands, that carpet spacer lands on is going to be adjacent to two tanks. And then you got to put that sea creature you just acquired in one of the two tanks. Now, you might have more than one sea creature because as if you're furthest behind, you might stop several points along the way and collect a bundle of sea creatures and then deploy them into two of the or one of the adjacent tanks that your employee lands on. And what's really cool about this game is that you're puzzling where these species should go because not everything is going to go smack bang into one tank. You're not going to put a shark with like a small or large fish.

3:11 You're not going to put a shark with a turtle. You got to think about the oxygen levels because each tank can have a maximum of four oxygen and you can expand that and raise that to six if you include some coral or some seaweed. And basically, you're trying to fit things together. I also want to mention that the sea turtles require a seaweed already to be placed in your chrome before you can put or house a turtle in the tank. And so what you're trying to do is pick the right species. They're going to puzzle out really well. Each players board is going to be connected to one event card. Think of it as like the poster tank that will lure all of those tourists and visitors to your aquarium. They're going to be at the front of your aquarium. And those two feature tanks might feature sharks or things that will attract visitors to, I guess, venture deeper into your uh aquarium. And so this game is all about thinking, okay, if I've got this species and this takes up this much oxy oxygen, can I put it in this tank, how am I going to move my employee around so that I can get it to the right tanks to drop those species in? And so, not only are you managing where you are on this market track with respect to the other players, you're also thinking about where you are in your actual own aquarium cuz you don't want to carry this giant whale shark and have to walk like five steps in order to put it in the next tank only to realize that that tank is already full. And now, anytime you pick a creature or creatures that don't fit in your creme, there's a

4:43 seabboard that they all kind of get released to. And this sea or ocean board is really cool because other players can now pick up or purchase those animal species and place it in their own aquarium. You can also buy seaweed and coral from there to try and decorate your aquarium before housing particular species. But yeah, it gives other players that chance to be able to rescue those animals that you couldn't quite house or you kind of over uh stretched in. You can also add advertising which gives you extra income based on the types of species that you have in your entire aquarium. And then you've also got these public objectives or composition tanks where all players are trying to compete to try and create those tanks first in order to get achievement points. And so at the end of the day, you've got this economy of managing your funds and using the funds to acquire uh plants and other sea creatures. You're also managing the oxygen levels. also thinking about what you might want to deny other players uh by taking certain things off the board and then you're also trying to race for achievements and through the combination of these two tracks you've got this really cool deep laid puzzle that I really quite enjoy. Now uh the game also comes with these advanced creatures which actually don't get put out on this marker board. Uh, you've got these advertising spaces that when you use the advertising space, you can use them to either get money or you can use them to actually purchase or acquire a special feature species. And that kind of is

6:16 like a unique species that temporarily is on show in your aquarium that you you might want to show off uh to the other players at the table. And you know, this theme is one that I absolutely, you know, really enjoy. If you see this tank behind me in a lot of my videos, I've got minnows, I've got goldfish, guppies, some little shrimp. I just love the idea of nurturing animals and allowing them to grow and thrive and really just looking after and taking care of nature. Sky Garden is the second game in the Garden Trilogy. It's got a few extra layers to it that makes the game a little bit more mediumweight level. has a few more strategies that you can kind of explore and push the envelope with and quite a few more scoring opportunities and restrictions you're going to have to contend with. The general flow of the game is the same.

7:06 Here you've still got your playerboard where you've got your employee that moves around the rondelle. And here, whoever the furthest back in turn order is going to take the next thing. Although even though I've got the bird pieces displayed on this market area, the bird pieces have now been replaced with these cool little tokens. The reason why they're swapped in for tokens is because as you're feeling around in the bag, you're less likely to favor a certain type of token if you don't actually know what they are. And so here, this is just for display purposes. So there are three different types of tokens that you're going to be able to deal with. And you've now got lakes which are covered up by little tiles. And you've also got trees. So lakes and trees function quite similarly to the seaweed and coral and aqua garden where they expand your habitat by a level of two. However, in this game, you can either have a tree or a lake in a particular zone. You can't actually have both. So, if you don't want to use the lake, you can cover the little cover tile with a tree. Or if you want a lake, because some of the species require water in order to survive, you'll have to pay some funds to remove that tile.

8:17 You can also buy one single additional enclosure, which uh looks like this, and it can be flipped over so that you can just either put a tree or use it for its lakeside. that gives you that slight extra room to breathe and grow and that freedom to spread out your wings. Uh, no pun in well pun intended. And you're also trying to get these birds to breed, which allows you to create eggs and you can also place nests into each habitat as well. Additionally, just like in the base game, there are advertising spaces that are represented by these blue tokens. Before I talk about the advertising, what I like about these token chips is that in Aqua Garden, the advertising spaces were preprinted onto the game board. But here, the advertising spaces could be could appear really anywhere. They might appear to get two advertising spaces together or they might be positioned and spread out.

9:14 You've even got these uh orange tokens which are round tokens which allows you to take them on certain rounds for the species that are depicted if it is that particular round. So here you can get a 2can on round one if it's out in the market row. When you choose to use the advertising space to buy an advanced species by placing the advanced species in. It's going to give you it's going to require special cost, but it's also going to give you special ability that you can use throughout the rest of the game. There's one bird that kind of makes buying nests a lot cheaper. And if you have, you know, a certain number of them at the end of the game, you get a certain number of victory points. Uh here with the owl, at the end of the game, you'll gain three victory points for each token of the type that you have the fewest of, either hawks or flamingos. And so this gives you something that you can kind of strive for. And having this bird in your little avery is going to be able to give you that scoring power as well. Now, one of the newer aspects that Sky Garden introduces is the idea of breeding where if you've got two birds of the same species and a nest tile in the same enclosure, those two birds are actually going to go and sit on that nest tile and actually produce an egg. And if you produce an egg from those two species, you're going to be placing them in these 3D cardboard nests. Look how cool they look. The reason and the point of these nests is that at the bottom of the nest, you have each of the six different bird species printed on the base. And so if

10:44 you're breeding flamingos for the first time and they produce an egg, you get to put an egg on top of the flamingo space in your nest. And so this incentivizes you to try and diversify the different species that you want to reproduce. So if I've already done flamingos, I might trade toucans or I might try swans or hawks. And the more that I can cover up here at the end of the game, that is going to be a multiplying factor to where my egg token is on my playerboard track. So, if I've covered up four species because I've bred four different types of eggs and my egg market is in the four zone, that means it's going to be four time four points, which will give me 16 points at the end of the game. So, increasing the variety of species of eggs that you produce, as well as moving this egg up the egg track. And the way this egg moves up the egg track is when you have the same species constantly breeding all the time, it's going to push up that egg along this track more and more quickly.

11:42 And so part of the strategy in the game is trying to not just focus on one bird species, but a few different bird species at a time. Trying to invest in your egg producing strategy because the multiplying points up here cuz it goes all the way to nine is going to be relatively high. Another big key change to the game is that in Aqua Garden, you had these kind of achievement cards which kind of was the composition of the tanks. Now you've got this bird cage board which exists in a 3x3 grid. And basically if you complete three in a row, bit much like connect four, you get the bonus that's listed at the end of that row or in that column. And so the different bird cages have different little requirements like have two toucans in your uh little Avery park or it might be having three trees or having one special uh bird as well as a another bird of a different type. And so when you're trying to connect these together, you're going to be pulling cubes off your main playerboard and placing them onto the different bird cages that you've done. and that then reveals uh point values that you can score at the end of the game for your milestones that you've been able to achieve. Dino Garden is the third game and the most complex version of all three games in the Garden Trilogy. Here I'm going to talk about some of the main changes. uh the crux and the system of the game remains relatively similar to Sky Garden and Aqua Garden, but there are a few more nuances in this game that kind of

13:14 challenges. And for anyone who is really into Jurassic Park or anything that um revolves around trying to feed and manage a dino park, this might be the one for you. Now, this game also includes these little chips which kind of replaces uh putting out the 3D dinosaurs. So, these chips ensure that, you know, you can't kind of differentiate between, you know, a pyterodon and a triceratops. It kind of evens out the playing field a little bit. You've got these round chips that tell you on particular rounds which uh particular dinosaurs you can pick from. And this time, the advertising chips will just give you a stock standard three coins. You can still build or uh get these unique dinosaurs which give you endgame scoring abilities. They do cost you a little bit of your funds, but they do add to the scoring synergy that you have overall. Now, the most unique thing that is included in Dino Garden is the fact that the herbivores have particular food types that they want and the carnivores also need to be fed. And so there are three different types of meat tokens. And these meat tokens are metaphoric. Yes, herbivores eat plants.

14:27 Yet the, you know, you you're getting like, you know, a t-bone and a little drumstick and putting it with that dinosaur. So when you take a herbivore, you also get a matching uh meat token or food token. And then those food tokens are going to go in your enclosures. One of the big changes here is the use of a predator track. And these predator tracks are all different for each player. The predator tracks uh have little spaces where you're going to be moving your cube along. And so whenever you feed your predators, you could be able to move your marker up the predator track and unlock certain bonuses, scoring abilities, uh instance abilities, depending on which of these boards you have. And the combo of these boards is going to provide each player with something slightly different. And you've even got the menu of what each particular dino species likes to eat as well. This invites a little bit more asymmetry into the game. Whereas one player might incentivize getting points for having a certain type of Tyrannosaurus Rex, but then another player might be incentivized to having certain types of food in scattered around in their enclosures. And so what you have underneath your main playerboard is something that gives you uh a focus to kind of invest in, especially when it comes to deciding what sort of strategy you're going to use, what sort of dino park you're going to create, and how you're going to configure that as well. The other thing is you've got a food bag, which has a little bit of a restriction. You can kind of only max out with three food, or

15:58 if you upgrade it, you can max out with five food. When it comes to the predator or feeding, there are now three different little circuits you have to contend with. So, you've got this main market circuit that appears in all three games. You've got the employee which kind of rotates clockwise as well on this main game board, but now you have a third little employee which whose role is to feed the dinosaurs in the enclosure. And so while the employee moves in a clockwise direction, the feeder moves around the perimeter of your board in an anticlockwise direction. And where they land, you'll be able to take some food from your little food bag, you'll be able to drop it off in particular enclosures. So, when the predator phase comes around, if there is a particular species of dinosaur that wants that particular food, it will consume that food and then you'll get to move up a certain number of uh spaces on your predator track, unlocking bonuses. And so, this game or dino garden really gets you to think about the recipe for success. Really trying to think about what species you have in your uh particular zoo and how you're going to feed them. uh the differentiation between carnivores and herbivores. Uh the pteranodons, which are these little dinosaurs here that fly, will give you um two movement on the predator track, if you feed them a particular type of food. Uh the elasmosaurus will uh only stay in places where there's a lake. And just like in

17:29 the other two games, you know, you can either build a lake or you can build a volcano. And that expands your habitat size by two. This particular version also introduces these new dual objective tiles that appear on the main game area. And so when you complete both conditions, a top condition and a bottom condition, which usually involves having a certain number of a particular type of dino species in your park, you get to place a cube, get the certain number of points at the end of the game, but then at the beginning of the game, each player has a set of five bonus cards. Whenever you complete a pair of objectives, you then get to trigger one of these five bonus cards. Might be getting five funds, moving up plus four on the predator track, or getting particular types of dinosaurs or getting a lake or uh volcano or getting a discount for uh paying for a specialty dinosaur. And so these bonus cards will allow players to, I guess, supplement their main game strategy of trying to figure out and configure where different species of dinosaur are going to go, but also managing the predator track, the event tiles, the feeding requirements, and also trying to, I guess, boost their scoring opportunities using these bonus cards. So, the incentive to, I guess, complete these objectives is to get victory points, but also little resource boosts that help to advance your game further. This one does definitely feel like the most advanced of them all. I

19:01 also forgot to mention that in Sky Garden, your event cards now can kind of progressively upgrade based on the number of pairs of particular animals that you have. I'm not sure that was the case in the original Aqua Garden. Correct me if I'm wrong, though. But this game still retains the DNA of Aqua Garden and Sky Garden, but focuses more on the feeding frenzy side of things. So, which of these three games from the Garden Trilogy really piqu your interest the most? I guess if I were to rank the three games in terms of where they would fit in my collection, who I would I guess introduce them to, if I was introducing uh Euro games for the first time, I would definitely lean towards Aquagard just cuz it's got the base system. It's super simple and easy to get into and plus it's very eye-catching. I think for people who love a midway Euro game, Sky Garden definitely has that point salady nature of trying to align the victory points, getting them into that right um synergy and trying to uh I guess do things to maximize the victory point outcome that you're going to get. Whereas Dino Garden is more about solving a more interlocked and interwoven puzzle by trying to create the recipe for feeding different species of dinosaur. And so in Dino Garden, it is quite meaty, but there's a lot more juggling and restrictions involved. So I guess out of the three games, my preference would be Sky Garden, then Aqua Garden, and then Dino

20:31 Garden in terms of uh I guess which ones I really enjoyed. But uh all three of them do have different audiences and do have a different place. I guess the big question here is whether they're all vastly different enough for you to own all three in your game collection. Thank you once again for joining me for another Board Game Sanctuary video. If you really found this video super helpful, don't forget to like and subscribe to my channel. If you also want to support this channel, help me grow, then please consider buying me a coffee a month over at my Patreon page. Otherwise, this is Danny Sia. I know I'm going on a deep venture on some of these cool board games from Asia, and I hope to bring you some more amazing board game content soon.