About Alea’s Garden
Alea’s Garden is a solo card game designed by Brave James, with art and co-design by Jon Tiburzi and cover art by Georg Fischer. The designers call it a cosy polyomino deckbuilder: the cards you draw are laid out, overlapping, into a garden of square plots. Action cards show shapes of water to place on that grid, and watered plots yield blossoms and sunlight. Each action also spreads rot, shaped the same way, which takes up space you need. Over five years you upgrade and expand your garden deck; score 25 points or more at the end and you win.
It won the BoardGameGeek 2025 Solitaire Print and Play Contest, taking first place for Best Overall Game, Most Innovative Mechanic, Best Graphic Design, Best AI System and Best Artist. The rulebook gives one player and 30 minutes. The cards and rules are free on Google Drive from the designers’ link page, along with a how-to-play video. It suits solo players who enjoy spatial puzzles and the slow build of a deckbuilder.
How to play in one minute
- Shuffle the 8 starting cards to form the garden deck and draw the bottom 5, overlapped into a 5 x 4 grid of plots. Shuffle the action deck into two piles.
- Action phase: take the top card of either action pile and do its actions in order. Watering places blue cubes in the pictured shape (rotated or flipped as you like); watered blossom and sunlight plots give resources.
- Rot cubes then grow in their own shape on empty plots. Keep choosing action cards until one cannot be fully done; then clear the garden.
- Upgrade phase: spend the resources you gained to flip garden cards to their stronger side, or add one of three expansion cards to your garden deck.
- Clean up, advance the year and redraw your garden. After year 5, upgrade once more and add up the points on your garden cards; 25 or more wins.
What’s in the PDF
- Rulebook v1.3: 4 Letter pages with an appendix of every special plot.
- 46 cards in colour on 16 Letter pages, or a 92-page file with one card per page for print services.
- You add 30 blue and 30 black cubes and a few tracker cubes.
In the PDF
- Rulebook v1.3 with appendix (4 Letter pages)
- 46 cards: starting, expansion, action and track cards (16 Letter pages)
- Alternative one-card-per-page layout (92 pages)
