Pick a Pen: Gardens

About this board game

Pick a Pen: Gardens is a pencil-drafting game for 2–4 players that takes about 30 minutes to play. Each turn, the active player rolls five colored pencils, chooses one, and uses it to mark spaces on their individual player sheet.

The selected pencil’s top side shows symbols that determine what players do. After the active player makes their choice, every other player drafts a pencil in turn and uses it on their own sheet, keeping everyone involved throughout the round.

Each sheet contains bordered gardens that you gradually fill with color. On a turn, you must fill the indicated number of spaces in the chosen color. These spaces must be adjacent to one another and also adjacent to everything you have colored previously, making each decision part of a growing connected design.

Your scoring goals give the garden its central challenge. Try to complete gardens using only one color, or fill them with five different colors to earn bonus points. Choosing which pencil to take can help your own plans while also affecting the options available to the other players.

• Three difficulty levels of player sheets
• Flowers and trees on sheets 2 and 3
• Bonus points earned in different ways on the more advanced sheets

The game ends when a player has completely colored all of their gardens or has failed to color in five times. With its shared pencil selection and evolving garden patterns, Pick a Pen: Gardens challenges players to plan connected spaces while adapting to the symbols and colors available each turn.