Pergola
In Pergola, players develop their gardens, grow new plants, and attract insects and small animals. On their turn, a player chooses one of the four available tools, picks the presented items, and arranges them in their garden. Then they perform the action corresponding to the chosen tool. Since players have a lot of freedom in arranging plants in their gardens, after fifteen rounds each garden looks completely different and scores differently. The player who accumulates the most points wins.
Number of players: 1 - 4
Game duration: 16 mn
Complexity: 3 / 5
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Play Pergola and 1184 other games online.
No download necessary - play directly from your web browser.
With your friends and thousands of players from the whole world.
Free.
Rules summary
Objective
You are a gardener. Over 15 rounds you will grow and place plants, attract insects, and use special actions to develop your garden. At the end, you score on multiple categories, and the player with the highest total wins.
Setup
Each player gets: a garden board, a pergola board, a cascade (water) board, a scoring sheet, and starting tokens (frog, 2 water drops, birdhouse, honey pots). There is a shared action board with 4 action spaces, and a pool of tools (shovels, rakes, trowels, hoes) used in draft/action selection. The insect tokens, plants, lanterns, leaves, etc., are placed in a central supply.
Turn Structure
Each turn has 4 steps:
- Pick a Tool: Choose one of the tools from the action board. This also “locks in” the action associated with that spot.
- Enrich Your Garden: Take the plant/insect tokens indicated by the tool, and place them in your garden (or insects in free flying space) following placement rules.
- Perform the Action: The tool you picked tells you which of 4 actions to carry out:
- Insect Flutter: move insects (ladybugs, butterflies, bees) in your garden
- Bird Flight: draw a leaf from the leaf piles, then take the insect shown
- Water Drop: move one water drop down the cascade; if it lands on an insect, you gain it
- Frog Jump: move your frog to a waterlily in the pond, and gain the insect/dragonfly if conditions are met
- Cleanup / Refresh: Refill the gap on the action board, slide tools, and draw a new tool to replenish. The tool you used goes into your tool pot to mark your turn count.
Repeat until each player has taken 15 turns.
Placement & Special Rules
Plants & insects must follow placement restrictions (e.g. magnolias branch, insects go on matching plants or flying space).
Dragonflies require prerequisites before you can collect them.
Lanterns give special one-time bonuses.
Honey pots are filled by bees on buttercups and score points.
Some actions chain (e.g. extra water drip).
End game scoring
At game end, players score from:
- Plants
- Each row of 3/2/1 different colored hollyhock flowers gives 6/2/1 points.
- Each magnolia on level 1-3/4/5+ scores 1/2/3 points (whether it is single or double branch).
- Each pair of pink+blue buttercups gives 3 points (whether there is a bee or not).
- Insects
- Each butterfly on level 1/2-3/4+ scores 1/2/3 points.
- Each ladybug scores 1/2/3 points if there are 1/2/3+ ladybugs on its level.
- Bees give points only for plants that are fully occupied. 2/4 points per buttercups with 1/2 bees, 8 points for lavenders with 3 bees.
- Each small/medium/large dragonfly scores 1/3/5 points.
- Filled honey pots
- Leaves of different colors on the birdhouse
- Cascade bonuses
Highest total wins.