Tea Garden is a classic euro board game, a mishmash of little systems, progress tracks, currencies, and doodads that offer the player a multitude of different ways to collect victory points. During a recent playthrough, one little system struck me as particularly interesting - not for its tactical challenge, but for how perfectly it married its mechanics and theme, something that eurogames notoriously suck at.
Tea Garden is a medium-complexity strategy board game. You're playing as tea merchants, growing and harvesting tea, and using the profits to expand your holdings, acquire fancy teapots, curry favor in the Imperial Court, and send your servants to tea university. In reality you're skating across a thin crust of theme above a deep sea of optimisation and maths, just like 90% of eurogames.
Coming from me, that's not a criticism - I'm fine with games that are secretly a competition to see which player can make the numbers dance in the tightest chorus line - but it is at the root of a common criticism of eurogames. Eurogame themes are often bolted on top of a largely unrelated set of rules, like the bodywork around a car's chassis and engine, and they could be replaced with something different with basically no loss of function.
But one system in Tea Garden provides a neat example of how, and why, theme can contribute to a game. And it all comes down to tea leaves.
Tea leaves are a critical currency in Tea Garden. You'll spend them in a few ways: buying additional cards for the deck that powers your actions, selling them to merchants in exchange for victory points and other rewards, using them to charm the Emperor of China, and even buying additional actions on your turn.
Unlike sheep, wood, and other classic eurogame resources, the quality of your tea leaves can matter just as much as the quantity. Merchant contracts can only be fulfilled with tea that meets a certain minimum quality level; you need ever better tea leaves to keep purchasing new cards for your deck; and you can only sustain your charm offensive with the Emperor by serving him ever better brews. Tea from your first farm is of the very lowest quality, so you need to expand your operation out to ever more distant holdings.
But there's a problem. Tea left over in your warehouses at the end of the round will spoil and degrade in quality - unless, that is, you've fermented it first. Fermented tea only gets better with time, and increases in quality round after round. Of course, fermenting tea takes during a round takes your focus off your other priorities, like building farms of buying cards. And since you need to spend fermented tea to take certain high powered actions, there's always an incentive to burn through your stocks.
In the part of the game that's all about maths and efficiency, this is a much more interesting currency than money. Your stock of tea leaves will expand and contract like any other resource, but it will also degrade over time. Can you afford to invest in fermenting your tea leaves? And once you've fermented them, will you hold them so they improve, or spend them on powerful upgraded actions here and now? It's a resource that takes genuine management.
The fact that you're doing all this with tea leaves makes the mechanics for spoiling and fermenting easier to understand and easier to remember. Tea companies make a lot of advertising claims about how freshly picked their leaves are, so we all expect picked tea leaves to spoil fast. And anyone who is well acquainted with cheese will understand that fermented food only improves with time.
You couldn't reskin this economy to work with gold - the whole point of gold is that it's an inert metal that never changes. The average green salad is renowned for turning to a vile slime as soon as you close the fridge door, and it can be fermented into sauerkraut, so perhaps that would work instead. But if there's a historical period when aristocratic dynasties were swept up by the romance of lettuce farming, I hope never to learn of it.
Tea Garden isn't a simulation of tea farming - it's not even an abstraction of tea farming. But the tea leaf economy makes clever use of a concrete theme to ground a novel mechanic in the players' imagination. It's an anchor point that ensures at least one of the game's many systems is easy to understand and to remember. Frankly, I just think it's neat.
Do you know any board games where one little system stands out as an example of great design? Do you have a favorite thematic euro game - or a favorite euro game with a theme so transparently tacked on that it makes you laugh? Come and let us know in the Wargamer Discord community - we love to discuss this kind of stuff.
The team at Wargamer continually tests new, recent, and (occasionally) very old games in search of additions to our guide to the best board games. That said, the games on my "to play" pile are facing competition from the RPG Doomspiral right now. It has deeply impressed me - check out my interview with the designers to learn more.