Tabletop games

Photosynthesis

Grow your forest using the light of a sun that moves around the board, then harvest your largest trees to score the most points.

You’ll need the game box. Marquoir sums up the rules and keeps score.

Setup

Each player takes the player board and pieces of their species: seeds, small, medium and large trees.
Some of the pieces go on the player board, to be bought; the rest are available straight away.
In turn, each player places two small trees on spaces on the outer edge of the board.
The scoring tokens are sorted into stacks by soil richness (1 to 4 leaves), highest values on top.

At the start of each round, the sun moves one step. Each tree that is not in the shadow of a tree at least as tall earns light points: 1, 2 or 3 depending on its size.
A shadow reaches as many spaces as the size of the tree casting it.
Then each player spends their light: buy pieces, plant a seed near one of their trees, grow a tree by one size, or harvest a large tree.
A given space can only be activated once per round.
A replaced piece goes back to the player board if there is a free spot, otherwise it leaves the game.

Harvesting a large tree earns the top token of the stack matching the richness of its space; if that stack is empty, take from the next stack down.
At the end of the game, +1 point per full 3 unspent light points.

The game ends after the sun has gone around the board three full times (four in the expert variant).
The highest total wins.

Does a small tree shade a large one?

No. A tree is only deprived of light by the shadow of a tree of equal or greater size.

Can you plant a seed anywhere?

No. A seed goes within a limited distance of the tree that plants it, and that distance depends on the tree's size.