Players design and cultivate a personal garden over the course of four rounds of play, gradually building a tableau of flower beds, trees, ornamental features, and bee hives that form a flourishing ecosystem with each other, but also with their neighbours’ gardens. Each player scores points from the combinations of plants and landscape elements they cultivate. The game can be played competitively, where the highest-scoring garden wins, or cooperatively, where players collectively aim to create the most flourishing set of gardens possible.
The game’s central mechanism is card drafting. Each turn, players select one card to add to their garden tableau while passing other cards to adjacent players. Over the course of the game, gardens grow into a grid of interconnected plants and features.
The cards depict beautiful art of different plant species and garden features, and the ecological theme emerges through the set-collection system, where different plant species interact, and some cards also score based on the plants present in neighbouring gardens, emphasising the interdependence of adjacent environments and the way ecological systems extend beyond individual boundaries.
Flourish portrays garden design as a process of cultivation and harmony. It highlights the pleasures of nurturing plant life and designing balanced, natural spaces, presenting ecology as a collaborative, creative act of growth and stewardship.