Granny Hortensia has died, and on the eve of the next blood moon, appears before her four grandkids and offers her entire estate to the one that can best keep her garden.
That’s the theme of La Familia Hort, a somewhat spooky gardening game with some fantastic sort of Edward Gorey meets Tim Burton style artwork and two levels of play.
Disclosure: Thanks to Grand Gamers Guild for giving us a review copy of this gardening game and for being a previous sponsor of The Tabletop Bellhop Gaming Podcast. Links below may be affiliate links, using those costs you nothing extra but helps us offset the cost of hosting cost for this blog. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
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What do you get with La Familia Hort?
La Familia Hort is a tile based gardening board game for two to four players, designed by Ramiro Merinero. It’s quick playing and easy to learn. Even your first game will take well under an hour and games of under half an hour can be expected with experienced players.
The box includes both a basic, family-weight, game, and an asymmetric advanced game. There is no text on any of the player boards which means no reading is required and makes this a great game for families, with a recommended age of eight plus. I could see some younger kids enjoying this as well.
The most striking and enjoyable part of La Familia Hort is the fantastic artwork from Esther Mendez. It’s creepy, cool, and feels like a mash up of the aesthetics of Edward Gorey and Tim Burton.
The components in this spooky game about gardening include cardboard coins, thick player boards and tiles, and wooden cubes in two colours. The rulebook is clear and easy to learn from and the iconography is excellent. The box is nice and small and the game has a reasonable price point for it’s size.
We originally talked about La Familia Hort on Episode 255 of The Tabletop Bellhop Gaming Podcast, and I encourage you to check that out to hear some more thoughts on this game including what Sean and Deanna though of it.
Tending Granny’s Garden in La Familia Hort
The goal of La Famia Hort is to be the grandchild with the most gardening experience by the time Granny Hortensia comes back to visit on the eve of the third blood moon. This can come in as few as four rounds or as many as six.
The experience points you need to win the game come from upgrading tools, feeding animals, and growing flowers but you will need money for all of those things and you earn money in La Familiar Hort by selling vegetables.
To get started gardening, each player chooses a player board. The group then decides which side of the player boards to use. One side of each board matches the others and is what you should use for your first few games, or when playing with kids. The other sides are asymmetric, with each player having a unique power and getting different bonuses as they level up. We’ve also found you can mix and match the boards without a huge change in game balance.
Next you mix up all of the gardening tiles, and shuffle the round cards which are then handed to the first player with the first round tile on top. Finally, you give each player seven coins and set their experience track marker on zero, and you’re good to go.
Each round of gardening in La Familia Hort, including the first, starts with a number of tiles being added to the shared market. Players buy tiles from this market, in turn, one at a time until everyone passes. A player may pass because they don’t want any tiles, the market is empty, or they’ve run out of coins.
Every time a player purchases a tile, they must immediately place it into their garden (a.k.a. player board), which has six spots to hold tiles. Once the last tile has been bought and placed you move to the fertilizer round.
Each players gets a fertilizer cube and then either fertilizes one of their own plants or a plant of a player next to them.
Which option you have to take is based on the current round card. Each plant in La Familia Hort can hold one cube, they are either fertilized or not fertilized. In addition to the ‘free’ cube you get in the fertilizer round, there are ways to get additional fertilizer cubes through one of the asymmetric abilities or one of the upgrade tiles.
Next is a watering phase where players add water cubes to their well based on the current round tile. Then they distribute this water in their garden as they see fit. Each plant tile has room to hold one or more water cubes but you can only add one cube per plant per turn. Each player also has an apple tree on their board that can be watered, plus their wells can hold any left over water between rounds.
The last step each round is for players to sell things from their garden. Everyone must sell their fully watered plants, this is not optional. Plants that have been fertilized give a bigger reward than those that are not. Selling vegetables gives players coins to be able to buy more stuff from the market whereas selling flowers gives them valuable experience points, which they will need to win the game.
Play then continues, with the stack of round cards being passed clockwise to the next player and a new card drawn, until three blood moon tiles have been revealed. Once the third blood moon tile gets pulled, the game ends at the end of that round. Players then gain one experience for every five coins they have, and the player with the most experience wins. Ties are broken first by most left over coins and then by left over water.
That’s the basic flow of the game for La Familiar Hort but there are some other interesting things going on here. Starting with the various vegetable tiles. All veggies take up to two water and provide coins but the amount varies by veggie. For example corn only takes one water, meaning that you may sell it the round you plant it. It only costs one coin but it also only generates one coin when sold, unless it’s fertilized, which means it would then earn you two coins.
Radishes on the other hand cost two coins, but earn you three or four experience. Pumpkins take even longer to grow but are worth even more money. So there are interesting decisions points as to which veggies you should be purchasing.
The experience point earning flowers work pretty much the same, though the easiest to grow flower takes two turns at a minimum to be able to sell. One of the hardest decisions in the game is when to shift your focus from growing money making veggies to point making flowers.
In addition to flowers and veggies, the market tiles also include various animals and tool upgrades. There’s a bee that gives you two coins per round but only if you have a flower in your garden, a chicken that can eat one of your vegetables for points but only if you’ve given it water each season, a watering can that generates two water each round, and more.
Then we get to one of the most fun parts of the game. There are actually two different sets of market tiles in La Familiar Hort. There’s one you pull from on a normal round and a separate one that you only pull from during a blood moon. The blood moon veggies and flowers are all twisted and evil looking. These including mandrake and snapdragons as well as additional tools like the scarecrow that gives you one experience just for standing there and the compost box that generates fertilizer each round.
All of the veggies and flowers included in the blood moon tiles are much better than the basic ones. For example the madcap mushroom is similar to corn in that it only takes one water to be ready to harvest but it gives five or six coins instead of one or two.
Adding to this variability is the fact that the advanced side of each player board has a special ability. One kid can put a coin on a market card and when it’s bought they get the money instead of the bank, another generates fertilizer each turn but if they chose to do so they must also fertilize another players crop, then there’s one that can water a single plant twice but if they do so they also have to water something of an opponents, and the last kid can buy and sell experience points for four coins.
All of this leads to a lot of variety and replayability in La Familia Hort. While flowers seem like the best way to get experience, you also get experience for your end of game coins and we’ve seen someone win just by buying and selling veggies all game. Similarly each tool you buy gives you a point and just having things like a set of a watering can, a scarecrow and a compost heap could be enough to tip the scales in your favour.
Scores in La Famila Hort tend to be pretty low and are always close. This is a game where a score of fifteen is really good and probably will only happen if you don’t draw that final blood moon until the last round. Most games are in the 10-12 point range, with only a point or two difference between first and second place. This really drives home how every little point you can eek out matters in this game.
La Familiar Hort is light gardening goodness with a touch of creepiness.
La Familia Hort is not a heavy game. This isn’t an Uwe Rosenburg farming game. This is a quick, fast playing, game about managing a single garden with a cool and unique theme. The game only lasts from four to six rounds. This is a game you can bang out in half an hour with experienced players, even when using the advanced rules.
The theme is what really drew me to the game. When we were introduced to it, Marc from Grand Gamers Guild didn’t tell us at all about the Blood Moon tiles, he surprised us with them when they first came up and that was a big part of what won us over. Seeing the awesome creepy but cute artwork elevated the game to the next level.
As it stands La Familia Hort is a very solid gardening game with a strong feeling of progression. As a farming game it just makes sense, the actions you take are logical. You buy seeds and things for your garden, you fertilize where you can, you water everything you can and then harvest what’s ready for rewards. Some things take longer to grow than others, but are worth the wait when harvested.
Even the fact that veggies help you make money, but it’s the flowers and tool upgrades that actually show how you’ve advanced as a gardener makes sense. Veggies are easy to grow, beautiful flowers take more work.
One thing that may not have been obvious from my gameplay overview is how the round structure works and adds tension and a bit of a push your luck element to the game. You never know at the start of the game if the game is going to go four rounds or more. As things progress and you start to see the blood moon tiles come up you know that end is coming and how soon they show up can help you estimate when the game will end.
This leads to interesting decisions. Do you buy a rose on round three, knowing that it will take two more rounds before it can be harvested hoping that the game goes at least that long? If you haven’t seen a blood moon yet that’s an easy decision but what if you’ve already seen one? How about two?
Like many flowers, La Familia Hort does have a couple of thrones. The biggest is the icons on the round tiles. They feature little arrows that point in or out to remind you of what you should be doing. This is most hard to see for the fertilization round where it’s hard to tell if you are supposed to be fertilizing your own plants or one of your opponents. That’s also an aspect of the game that’s easy to forget.
The other thing I found after playing many games in the same week with different people is that despite all of the variability in the tiles and the two different modes of play, the game can start to feel a bit repetitive.
To me, La Familia Hort is a game you break out now and then, one you return to occasionally to play a round, maybe two and then put it away. For me, mainly due to it’s theme it’s become one of the games we tend to break out in October for spooky season. It gets played at home and at a few of our local events, where people seem to enjoy it and then it gets put away until the next time we have a gardening themed game night, want to show off the art to our goth friends, or spooky seasons comes around again.
It’s not a game we play week after week, many times in a row, but a game I am happy to return to a few times a year. It’s still in my collection now and still gets played, which is more than I can say for a lot of games.
Overall I dig La Familia Hort. I’m glad Marc took the time to show it to us. While I do dig the art, I don’t think this is a game I would have noticed had it not been pointed out to me. I think it’s a solid welcoming game that’s elevated by it’s cool theme. It’s that theme that makes it more than just another gardening game.
On the podcast, Sean noted that he felt this game felt more like a game for goths than a horror/Halloween themed game, and well, if that’s your aesthetic I do think this is a good game to add to your collection.
This is a game that is just about buying, planting, watering and fertilizing, without the worry of building of buildings, raising and feeding a family, or exploring caves. If you enjoy farming games and the mechanics that go with them, where patience is rewarded and you have to manage limited resources, this is a great quick playing game to scratch that board gaming green thumb.
FAQs
Is La Familia Hort based on an IP?
This was the question I asked the publisher when I first saw the game. I thought it may have been based on a webcomic or something, but no. The game features unique artwork by Esther Mendez created just for this game. If you want more info on the Hort family you are going to have to make that up on your own.
If I like the gardening in La Familia Hort what other games should I check out?
La Familia Hort is what I would consider a gateway Farming Game, where you are dealing with just one garden. There are a number of Farming Games out there that are much more involved and complicated.
While it’s a significant step up in complexity I strongly recommend Agricola if you like the farming mechanics in La Familia Hort. Other good choices include Viticulture, At the Gates of Loyang, Caverna, and the top rated A Feast for Odin.
What other games have creepy artwork like La Familia Hort
You can find more awesome artwork from Esther Mendez in La Fallera Calavera, Alakazum!, Paella Park, and The Zombie Paella.
Other games with creepy artwork I dig include The Night Cage, Psychobabble, Gloom, and Sorcerer.
La Familia Hort was a pleasant surprise for us. I always love it when someone shows us a game that we’ve heard of but didn’t pay much attention to and shows us why we should care.
I love discovering hidden gems like this, games people may completely miss. Even more I love writing about them, talking about them and showing them off in pubic so that more people get to learn about them.
It’s funky little good games like this one that make me happy to be a gaming ambassador.
- In La Familia Hort, four grandchildren vie to inherit Granny Hortensia’s farm by planting crops, managing bees and chickens, and growing carnivorous flowers, all to earn Granny’s favor.
- Engage in clever resource management as you water and fertilize your land, balancing the needs of your crops and livestock to optimize your farm’s productivity and appeal.
- The game features a spooky twist with the eerie Red Moon, adding an element of strategic planning as you prepare for Granny’s crucial visit on the third Red Moon.
