🌾 Root Rivals

Objective

Grow the highest-scoring garden. The season lasts 8 rounds; every gardener gets exactly one turn per round. At Harvest Day, whoever's 3 plots add up to the most Growth wins. Nobody is eliminated and nothing is destroyed — the worst that can happen to a plant is it gets taken by a rival or withers from decay.

Your Turn

You have 3 plots to fill and a hand of 5 cards. Each turn, do exactly one of:

🌱 Garden	Play one card from your hand (see below).
🔨 Craft	Discard 2 cards for a crafted effect instead (see below).
💤 Pass	Do nothing this turn.

Either way, you draw back up to a full hand of 5 afterward.

Season Decay

🍂 At the end of every round, every planted plant on every garden loses 1 Growth — including your rivals'. The one exception is a plot you've made Evergreen (see Crafting), which decay skips. A plant that decays to 0 withers away completely. This is why timing matters: a big plant played on round 1 has to survive 7 rounds of decay, while the same plant played on round 7 barely loses anything.

Gardening — play one card

🌱🌿🌳 Plant	Fills an open plot. Its Growth counts toward your final score. Comes in 3 sizes: Seedling (2), Sprout (4), Oak Sapling (6).
☀️ Sunlight	+3 Growth to one of your own plants.
🪤 Root Snare	Take a rival's plant straight into your own open plot — nothing is destroyed, it just changes gardens. The plant suffers transplant shock and loses 1 Growth in the move (never dropping below 1). Needs an open plot of your own, and can't take a Protected plant.

Crafting — spend 2 cards instead of playing one

Crafting still counts as your turn and still ends with a fresh draw back up to 5. Every recipe costs exactly 2 cards. Most are picked for you at random from the ones that fit (the log shows which) — Cross-Pollinate is the exception, where you choose the 2 cards you give:

🧺 Bumper Harvest	Discard 2 Item cards → +6 Growth to one of your own plants.
🛡️ Ironroot Sapling	Discard any 2 cards, picked at random — even another Ironroot or a Bumper Harvest → a Growth 5 sapling that can't be taken by Root Snare. You don't choose what goes, so a hand full of good cards makes this a gamble.
🌲 Evergreen Plot	Discard 2 Plant cards → choose one of your plots (empty or planted) to never decay again. One per garden. It's the plot that's special, not the plant: if a rival snares the plant, the plot stays Evergreen, and new plants you play go into an open Evergreen plot first. Best used early, while there's plenty of decay left to dodge.
🐝 Cross-Pollinate	Pick 2 cards from your hand and a rival. You swap: they get your 2 cards, and you take 2 random cards from their hand. Your hand stays at 5. Good for handing off cards that are dead for you right now (a Root Snare with no open plot, a Plant with a full garden) — but they might be exactly what your rival needs, and you can't see what you'll get.

Crafted cards (Bumper Harvest, Ironroot) aren't gone for good. Once played, discarded, or withered away, they go to the discard pile like any other card, and when the deck runs out the discard pile is reshuffled into a new deck — so a crafted card can come back around later in the season.

Stakes & Payout

Everyone starts the season with a purse (20 GP by default, adjustable in the setup panel) and antes 5 GP of it to enter. At Harvest Day the pot is paid back out by finishing place: the winner earns the most, each place below earns less, and last place gets nothing. The house keeps just 1 GP per game, whatever the size of the table.

2 gardeners	1st: 9 GP · 2nd: 0
3 gardeners	1st: 9 GP · 2nd: 5 · 3rd: 0
4 gardeners	1st: 10 GP · 2nd: 6 · 3rd: 3 · 4th: 0

After the 5 GP ante, a 4-gardener game nets out at +5, +1, −2 and −5.

Ties: gardeners who tie pool the payouts for the places they share and split them evenly. If that won't divide into whole GP, the odd leftover coins go to randomly chosen tied gardeners — the house never takes more than its 1 GP.