Photosynthesis

4th June 2019

Tuesday night and it's game time at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking with the board game club.

Does the idea of game about slowly growing trees excite you? If the answer is yes, then  Photosynthesis is the game for you!


What's in a game?

All of the components of photosynthesis are made from card. All of the of the tokens, even the trees. There are no plastic meeples or soulless wooden cubes here.
And even though this is the case, they are still good components. When a bunch of trees are all on the playing board. It looks impressive.

In photosynthesis there is a main playing board and a sun marker to indicate the direction of the sunlight. Additionally, each player has their own board that contains most of the seeds and trees needed to play the game.
Players also start with some seeds and trees that are not on the player board that are 'available' to use. There is an important difference between the two that will explained a little further down.

How's it play?

The premise of Photosynthesis is to plant seeds, grow the seeds until they become the largest possible trees and then score points from those trees.
 
In a normal game, play continues until the sun has completed 3 revolutions of the board. It takes 6 rounds to complete 1 revolution. Thus players each have a total of 18 turns to win the game.
Each round consists of 2 phases.
Phase one.

• The first phase allow players to collect 'light points', (This is the game's currency that allows players to carry out actions). Collecting light points is an intriguing process, it's dependant on the position of the sun.
• This is indicated by the sun marker, which will placed in 1 of the six positions around the board and indicates the direction of the sunlight.
• Any tree in sunlight earns its player light points, (The bigger the tree, the more points it earns.).
• However, trees cast shadows in the opposite direction of the sunlight, (The bigger the tree, the longer the shadow.). Any tree caught in a shadow does not earn light points. There is one exception, if the tree caught in the shadow is bigger than the tree casting the shadow, then the bigger tree will earn its full points.

So now that all the players have calculated their light points, play proceeds to the next phase.
Phase two.

• In this phase players can spend some or all of their light points to carry out various actions.
• Actions include planting seeds, growing trees or scoring trees. As well as acquiring seeds or trees.

​That's it for the basic rules. There are, however a few other rules to remember which are very important.

• Even though players will have multiple light points and can perform multiple actions. Only 1 action can originate from a space on the game board per turn. Therefore players cannot plant a seed and grow it into a tree in a single turn. Nor may they use a tree as a point of origin to plant a seed more than once per turn.
• Seeds and trees on the player board are not 'available' to use. Only the seeds and trees off of the board can be placed on to the main game board. Players must light points to purchase seeds and trees, in which case the are taken off of the player board and then become 'available' to be used.
• When a player grows a seed into a small tree, or increases the size of any tree; they replace whatever is on the game board with its relevant 'upgrade'. Thus a seed is grown into a small tree is removed and replaced with the small tree. The seed is returned to the player's board, (It does not go to the 'available area.). If there is space available on the player board, then it is discarded and permanently removed from the game.

​All of these rules basically serve one purpose - to slow the game down. And that makes complete sense, this is a game about growing trees after all. It forces players to think a few turns ahead.
It takes time to score points. A tree can only score points when it is a 'large' size. It takes 4 actions to plant a seed and then go to a small, medium and large tree. Then it takes a 5th action to score it.
Furthermore it will take more actions and light points to 'buy' the seed and 3 different sized trees from the player board in order to do this.

Overall

Photosynthesis is a peculiar beast: It's a little bit like a worker placement game with trees earning light points from their positioning and it's a little bit like an area control game, where larger trees will shut out surrounding smaller ones.

It's simple to learn but forces players to adopt a 'ent-like' mentality towards the games varied choices, strategies and occasional hard decisions. It's slow place means players cannot burn light point to do one thing quickly. Sometimes it's possible to speed events by sacrificing seeds or trees, but this can be tricky choice as it's permanent. I'm sure there are ties when it is prudent to do so. But slow and steady, that's the way to go.

I think all of this good and makes for a good game. I'm sure Treebeard would agree!