About Happy Garden, from BoardGameGeek:
Happy Garden is a family game with a feel-good atmosphere, evoking the 70s and the Flower Power era.
In Happy Garden, each player must create the most beautiful garden. To do this, they choose one tile per turn from the Garden Center (flowers, garden gnomes, or windmills) and place it in their garden, adjacent to another tile.
The goal is to validate each tile to score points. To validate a flower, it must be surrounded by a flower of the same color (there are 6 colors), but of a different shape, as well as a flower of the same shape (there are also 6), but of a different color.
Garden gnomes are color jokers (each gnome contains 3 colors) and can be validated if they are surrounded by the 3 corresponding colors. As for the windmills, they are validated when aligned in a row or column containing 3 flowers of the same shape.
Of course, all of this would be simple if you could take more than one tile per turn, which is of course not the case! And to make matters worse, the Garden Center is not always fully available…
Things get even more complicated when you have to play with butterflies, wheelbarrows, earthworms, and moles to improve your score or reduce others' ones!
Oh yes, it's also important to mention that you need to be quick to complete your garden, as the number of turns is limited... ?
Behind its feel-good appearance and easy setup, Happy Garden hides a true gem of strategy and deep thinking. The one tile per turn rule forces players to plan the best combos to achieve the highest score possible.
Accessible enough for a mainstream audience and yet deep enough to satisfy the most demanding game enthusiasts, Happy Garden is one of those games you want to play again as soon as the first game ends!
-description from the publisher
