🌿 Root Rivals

Objective

Grow the highest-scoring garden. A Season runs 8 Weeks, one Turn each per gardener. At Harvest Day, Final Score = plant Growth + a diversity bonus. "True creation requires a heartbeat" — Eephil's own words, and why every plant here is grown, never crafted.

Sowing the Gardens again after Harvest Day starts a new Season of the same Match, carrying gold forward. Harvest Days won (🏆×N by each name) tally the same way across every Season — a tie for the top score is a win for everyone who shares it.

Cards & Deck

• Plant cards (Bamboo, Rose, Oak): play one into an open plot — the card discards, the plant stays and grows.
• Item cards (Compost, Graft, Mulch): play one for its effect, then it discards too.
• Crafted cards (Fertilizer, Greenhouse, Poacher's Spade, Woven Fence): never in the opening deck — built with the Craft action (recipes below). Sits in your hand until played, then discards and reshuffles like any other card — so you can draw one later, even a rival's.
• Scion: not craftable — earned only when a Poacher's Spade lands. Plays and discards the same as any other card.

The starting deck has 32 cards: 16 Plant (6 Bamboo, 5 Rose, 5 Oak) and 16 Item (6 Compost, 5 Graft, 5 Mulch) — Eephil's Sixteen, twice over: her Life in the Plants, her Crafting in the Items.

Your opening hand isn't a blind draw: you get 2 Plant cards and 3 Item cards from separate mini-decks, so nobody opens with a dead all-Item hand. Life is harder to make than Items — so you start with more Items than Plants. The leftover cards become the draw deck for the rest of the Season, shuffled into one pile.

Every played or discarded card lands in the discard pile, which reshuffles into the draw deck at the end of each Week — crafted cards too, so the deck keeps growing. If it ever runs dry mid-week, it reshuffles on the spot so a draw never fails.

Your Turn

You have 3 plots and a hand of 5 cards. Choose one action:

🌱 Garden	Play one card: a Plant, an Item, or a crafted card.
🔨 Craft	Spend cards on a recipe (cost listed with each recipe) — takes your whole Turn instead of playing a card. Unavailable in the final Week; the Week before is your last chance to Craft, and the game flags it for you.
🧺 Tend Garden	+1 Growth to every planted plot, once. Then discard your whole hand and draw 5 new cards.

You draw back to 5 after your action. The bar tracks progress toward Harvest Day; the 🂠 badge shows cards left to draw, and the 🗑️ badge shows cards waiting to reshuffle (hover it for a breakdown).

Growth & Plant Traits

Plants grow at the end of every Week, including the last one before Harvest Day. Growth has no cap, so the earlier a plant goes in, the more it stands to gain.

🎋 Bamboo (Base 1)	Fast: +2 Growth a Week. Lowest start, biggest payoff for planting early.
🌹 Rose (Base 7)	Middle path: solid start, steady +1 a Week — never the fastest, never the slowest.
🌳 Oak (Base 10)	Static: full Growth the instant it's planted, but skips the weekly gain every other plant gets. Greenhouse and Fertilizer bonuses still apply. Can be Grafted like any plant.

Item Cards

Compost, Graft, and Mulch. Playing one uses it up — then it discards and reshuffles like any other card.

🧹 Compost	Remove one of your plants. The plot gets Enriched Soil — the next plant placed there starts with +9 Growth. A Greenhouse plot stays one. Eephil's way: nothing lost is ever wasted.
🧬 Graft	Combine two plants of the same type into one — Growth adds together, free. Pick the plant to move first, then the plant it merges into (its old plot becomes open). If both plants had Fertilizer, the merged plant keeps both stacks (the only way to stack it), and Greenhouse status survives too. Example: Roses at Growth 6 and 8 graft into one Rose at Growth 14.
🍂 Mulch	+4 Growth, immediately, to one of your plants. One-time — no lasting bonus, and each plot can only be Mulched once per Season.

Crafting Recipes

Every recipe costs 2 Item cards and takes your whole Turn — a crafted card in your hand can stand in for an Item. The Spade is the exception: 1 crafted card + 1 other card. If only one valid pair is in your hand, it's picked for you — you still confirm. Unavailable in the final Week — the game flags the last-chance Week before it ("🔨 LAST CHANCE TO CRAFT") so you won't miss the window. Each recipe returns a card to your hand to play later. Eephil taught mortals the loom, the forge, and the kiln — every recipe below is her handiwork made playable.

💩 Fertilizer	2 Item cards → one plant gets +2 Growth a Week, starting next Week — it takes a Week to release its nutrients (no effect the Week it's played). One per plant — Grafting two Fertilized plants is the only way to stack it. You can also fertilize an empty plot: the nutrients wait in the soil and the next plant there inherits them — but the bonus only ever feeds a plant, never bare soil, so planting late earns nothing for the empty weeks. Travels through a Graft; lost if Composted. The fertilizer itself can't be poached off — marked 💩 on the plant — but a Spade can still steal the plant's grown Growth; only the weekly bonus is protected.
🌲 Greenhouse Plot	2 Item cards → one plot gets +2 Growth now if a plant is already there, then +1 a Week to the plot, and can't be Poached. Build as many as you like. Survives Compost and Graft.
🪢 Woven Fence	2 Item cards → play once: every planted plot gets +2 Growth now, and no rival's Spade can touch your garden for the rest of the Season. One per garden. Salt keeps what is; the fence lets nothing in.
🪏 Poacher's Spade	1 crafted card + 1 other card → steal up to 8 Growth above a rival's plant's base into a named Scion (e.g. "Rose Scion +4"). The plant keeps the rest — and its Fertilizer. Can't target Monoculture gardens, Greenhouse plots, or fenced gardens. Play the Scion on a matching plant of yours for instant Growth.
✂️ Scion	Not craftable — created only when a Spade lands. Names the plant type and amount (e.g. "Oak Scion +6"): play it on a matching plant of yours for that much instant Growth. Dead weight until you have a matching plant.

🛡️ Monoculture: if all 3 plots hold the same plant type, your garden is automatically immune to Poacher's Spade — no score bonus, and it's fragile: Graft two of those matching plants and you're down to 2, exposed again.

Harvest Day Scoring

Final Score = Total Plant Growth + Endgame Bonus:

• Biodiversity Bonus (+3): one Bamboo, one Rose, and one Oak in your garden. Shown live as soon as it's true. Eephil's own teaching — a rich diversity of life, spread across the world.

Rival Gardeners

Each rival has a personality (hover its tag) that changes how it leans, never the rules. No two rivals at a table share one.

🌿 Cultivator	Builds Woven Fences and Greenhouse plots, then outgrows the table from behind immunity.
🛡️ Guardian	Goes Monoculture when it's realistically on the table, or builds up Greenhouses — the patient defender.
🌾 Purist	Never crafts anything — no Fertilizer, Greenhouse, Spade, or Fence. Leans hard on Compost, Graft and Mulch, and whichever of Biodiversity or Monoculture is closer.
🗡️ Raider	The only rival that crafts Poacher's Spades — strikes whoever's leading, more readily as the Season runs out, or any plant that's clearly worth taking.

All rivals also chase the Biodiversity Bonus when it's in reach. Only the Raider ever crafts a Poacher's Spade; the others will still play one if they happen to already hold it, aimed at whoever's leading. A rival on a losing streak may rethink its whole approach and switch personalities between Seasons — leaning Guardian if a Raider's already at the table, or Raider if there isn't one — but never to a personality another active rival is already using.

Stakes & Payout

Everyone antes 5 GP — 6 GP in the first Season, where the extra 1 GP per player is the house's one-time cut. The table is always 4 gardeners, so the prize pot is 5 GP × 4 every Season. At Harvest Day, gardeners are ranked by Final Score and paid by place: 1st 13 GP · 2nd 5 GP · 3rd 2 GP · 4th 0 GP.

The house takes 1 GP per player, once — it comes out of the first Season's ante (plus 1 GP from any mid-match buy-in). That's its entire take.

Out of gold: a gardener who ends Harvest Day below 5 GP — or can't cover the next Season's 5 GP ante — is out of the Match for good. Between Seasons, a table panel lets you seat a fresh gardener to fill the empty chair and keep the Match going — an AI rival, or a human (join yourself, or pass the device). Either way the buy-in is 16 GP, less the house's 1 GP cut — or end the Match there.

Match end: the Match ends the moment a Season would start with fewer than 4 gardeners seated — the button reads End Match when that's what it will do. In practice, the first elimination ends it unless you seat a replacement. The richest purse wins the Match (Harvest wins break ties).

Ties: tied gardeners pool the payouts for the places they share and split evenly, rounded down — any leftover coin goes to the tied gardener earliest in that Season's turn order, poker-style. Example: two tie for 2nd — they split 2nd + 3rd's 5 + 2 = 7 GP, 3 GP each, and the odd 1 GP goes to whichever of the two took their turn first that season.

Eephil's Sixteen (lore, entirely optional)

The deck's 16-and-16 split of Plant and Item cards echoes Eephil's Sixteen Elements. None of this changes a rule — each one is essential to growing a garden. Four are primary — Fire, Earth, Air, Water — each shown with its three nearest kin.

• Fire · Will — planting a card: committing to grow something.
• Lava · Transformation — Graft, two plants melded into one.
• Lightning · Inspiration — the Bamboo's fast-growing spark.
• Steam · Pressure — the ante, stakes already on the table.
• Earth · Permanence — plants never die.
• Soil · Growth — everything grows, every Week.
• Ash · Imprint — Compost leaves Enriched Soil behind: the plot remembers.
• Salt · Preservation — Woven Fence, a garden nothing can reach.
• Air · Freedom — Tend Garden: your hand, let go.
• Smoke · Transcendence — the Biodiversity Bonus, at Harvest Day.
• Dust · Impermanence — the discard pile, forever reshuffled back in; Mulch's boost, gone the moment it's spent.
• Mist · Quickening — Fertilizer takes a Week to release its nutrients.
• Water · Change — Poacher's Spade, growth drawn off into a Scion and set loose again.
• Acid · Unmaking — Compost removes the plant itself.
• Clay · Potential — Greenhouse Plot, an investment paid out later.
• Ice · Stillness — Oak: a big number that never moves again.