Garden Geckos

Players: 2–6 players
Play time: 20–45 min
BGG rating: 6.9

The garden is full of geckos, scurrying around capturing bugs and seeking out new areas to hide. Each player represents five geckos that must work together to capture as many bugs as possible along with achieving objectives to score victory points. Objectives come in two forms, creating chains between geckos to link certain bug types, or simultaneously occupying certain patterns of terrain. Players have an on-going hand of 3 terrain tiles plus are dealt a secret bonus at the beginning of the game (a certain bug or terrain type). On their turn, players place a terrain tile (which contains a mix of 3 patterns) adjacent to a tile on the board with a matching terrain side and place a gecko over the matching pattern across the two tiles. If the placed tile fully surrounds a previously placed tile, the bug on the surrounded tile is awarded to the player with the most geckos touching it. Additionally, if the gecko placed results in a bug sequence in the objective market and/or a terrain sequence, the player is awarded the corresponding objective(s). The game end triggers when a player achieves six objectives, or if the last tile available is drafted. Each objective card has bug points on the bottom of it. The winner of the game is the player with the most bug points collected (objectives + awarded tiles + secret bonus) at the end of the game. -description from designer