The Everfruit Vale - tile-laying board game

THE EVERFRUIT VALE is a tile-laying game with two modes in one box, printed whole and played on an existing PlayGrid 10x10 board.

Ninety-six landscape tiles fill the board. On your turn you take one of four face-up tiles from the Forecast, place it anywhere along the edge of the vale in any rotation, refill, and do it again — then you may plant one Grovekeeper on either tile you placed.

What a Grovekeeper claims is the whole game. It does not claim the tile it stands on. It claims the entire root network that tile ends up in, and that network is measured at the END, once the board is full. A keeper planted on unconnected ground is a claim on whatever grows there. A network scores its fruit multiplied by the number of different habitats in it, so growth compounds rather than adds — two tiles can double a claim.

Two rules give the game its shape. A network holds ONE Grovekeeper for the whole game: you may not plant into an occupied network, and you may not place a tile that would fuse two of them. And a keeper's crown counts as an extra fruit of its own kind in the network it claims, so which of your four you spend is a real decision.

In the COOPERATIVE game the keepers are a shared supply, every network holding one scores once for the party, and three of five Wish tiles are revealed to build toward. Stars come at 260 points, at 300, and one for each Wish fulfilled.

Play it in your browser first

Not sure it is your kind of game? The Everfruit Vale has a free digital version: the same landscapes, roots and Grovekeepers, cooperative alone or with friends at one screen, or competitive against Easy, Medium or Hard bots. One game there tells you whether it is worth printing the set.

https://morassgames.com/games/everfruit-vale/

At a glance

Players 1–4 — competitive 2–4 , cooperative 1–4

Age 8+

Time 35–50 minutes (48 turns, 12 per seat at four players)

Rules weight 2 / 5 — take two, place two, maybe plant

Reading needed none in play — every habitat, fruit and Wish is a shape

Needs an existing PlayGrid 10×10 board. The box doubles as the draw hollow, so no cloth bag is required.

The dials

More stars means more of the named thing — never "better". Every row names both ends, so nothing here needs a legend.

Luck ★★☆☆☆ 1 = your choices decide it; 5 = the dice decide it

Depth ★★★☆☆ 1 = best play fits in one sentence; 5 = years to learn

Player interaction ★★★☆☆ 1 = solitaire side by side; 5 = every turn changes everyone's

Swing ★★★☆☆ 1 = the leader stays the leader; 5 = anyone can come back

Waiting between turns ★★★☆☆ 1 = almost no waiting; 5 = long gaps between your turns

Replayability ★★★★☆ 1 = identical every time; 5 = a new game each play

Rules weight ★★☆☆☆ 1 = taught in a sentence; 5 = a 40-page manual

Memory needed ★★☆☆☆ 1 = nothing to remember; 5 = constant recall

Reading needed ★☆☆☆☆ 1 = no text at all; 5 = unplayable without the language

Child-readiness ★★☆☆☆ 1 = adults only; 5 = a three-year-old can play

Setup time ★★☆☆☆ 1 = laid out in a minute; 5 = a long build every game

Print effort ★★★★★ 1 = a couple of parts; 5 = a hundred-plus pieces

Table presence ★★★★☆ 1 = flat tokens; 5 = a centrepiece people stop to look at

What You Print

126 pieces from 42 distinct shapes: 24 landscape designs printed four times, four Heartgroves, sixteen Grovekeepers, five Wishes, a Forecast rack, the first-player marker, and a box that doubles as the draw hollow. Its body is a closed tub — four unbroken walls, so a box that is picked up or knocked cannot shed a tile — and you lift the lid by the aperture in its skirt, stir, and draw with your eyes elsewhere. A lift-out tray sorts every small part above the tile pile. The four Heartgroves stand on moulded plinths whose edges are notched once for the first and four times for the last, so they are told apart from any seat without picking one up.

The set is fully playable in a single filament: every habitat, fruit and Wish is an engraved shape, not a colour. Multi-colour files are included for anyone who wants them, with a colour guide and the AMS batching plan in the assembly guide.

Rules

An illustrated rules booklet is included in English plus nine machine-translated editions: Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak and Chinese.