Click A Tree

In the tile-laying game Click A Tree, players embody Ghanaian farmers. They have adapted to climatic conditions and learned to make use of their surroundings, planting their crops in the shade of trees. In this game, you want to plant trees in a strategic arrangement, deploy your harvest workers skillfully, and reap the most harvest.

To set up, randomly draw nine of fifteen tasks; each player places the matching task strips in the empty spaces at the top of their player board, then places seven fruit markers on level 1 of their board. Each player shuffles their fourteen harvest tiles and reveals two of them. Place the seven fruit markers in a circle, then place a random landscape tile between each pair of markers to form the market. Each tile shows one of six trees, one or two fruit types, and either A, B, or AB. Each player starts with a random landscape tile in front of them.

On a turn, choose a fruit marker on your player board, lower it by one space, then collect the two landscape tiles surrounding this marker in the market. Add these tiles to your board, then choose one of your face-up harvest tiles and add it to your forest. Each sickle on the harvest tile adjacent to a landscape tile earns you one fruit of that type for each tile in that fruit group, e.g., placing a sickle next to avocados in a connected group of four tiles will raise your avocado marker four spaces on your player board.

Except sometimes it won't. A fruit marker can't rise to level 2 until you complete a task and remove that strip from your board. To complete a task, you need to arrange trees of the same type in specific configurations, or create a long line of trees, or connect trees with the same letter, or use harvest tiles in defined ways. Whenever you complete a task, you remove that strip, then push all remaining tasks up, giving your fruit markers room to move up.

You also harvest fruit when you place a landscape tile next to a sickle already in play. When all sickles on a harvest have been used, that tile is fulfilled, which lets you lower a number marker on your player board. When enough of your fruit markers move past a number marker — e.g., two past the 2 near the top of the player board, five past the 5, or all seven past the 7 — the game ends at the end of that round. If only one player has triggered the end of the game, they win; if multiple players have, they sum the value of their fruit to determine a winner.