Welcome to “Board with Myself,” a feature in which I talk about solo board games and board games with solo modes. Sometimes you don’t have a lot of friends. Sometimes you don’t have many friends at all. That’s when you have to be board with yourself.
Orchard is the best type of game: Small.
Imagine the box for Gloomhaven. You got that in mind? Big box! Heavy! Orchard isn’t that. Small box. Less heavy!
Tiny!
Minuscule!
And within that box is a tiny, minuscule game. It’s all pretty basic: You get a deck of a few cards. Each card has six symbols of various fruits (basically just different colors). As you put down a card each turn, you want to layer as many matching symbols as possible. This is obviously hard since each card has those symbols in different configurations.
The more matching symbols you can layer over each other, the more points you get. Points are represented by confusing-but-cute dice that randomly jump in point counts for no reason other than being adorable. You also have two opportunities to stack symbols that don’t match, but that tends to be a last resort situation since it makes scoring a bit harder. I dunno. You live your life.
Orchard is a nice, relaxing game that only takes ten minutes. You blow through it fast enough that the first few times, you think you’re playing it wrong. But there’s something sweet and calming and sweet again about building a little fruit orchard on your table.
At around $16, Orchard is a little expensive for what it is - but also it’s smaller than a deck of cards and built for solo. You can’t put a price on that. Well, you can. It’s $16.
There’s also a two-player mode if you buy another deck and have friends. Loser.