Growth Reviews

cool game.

Do I still remember the time I've asked my sister, if she would play with me that 40 € board game, before buying it? And then never playing it with me? Well, this game here is pretty much a candidate for board game of the year. Minus the board. And the sister. Nice. PS: Growth plays a bit like Dorfromantik, an actual game of the year. But while Dorfromantik is getting more difficult over time, Growth stays casual. (The end of the game is a bit tricky, though, but I won't spoil anything here.) But Growth never says that it wants to be difficult. It is a nice, cozy, board-like game that you can play for a couple of minutes or a full session of ~1,5-2h. There are a few unlockables like skills that show obstacles in a selected area. This keeps you motivated to play it some more. But do not expect that you can play this for many hours each day and for hundreds of hours in total. Edit: Getting all achievements took me about 14 hours.

Growth's rules are simple but very well designed: the game is relaxing without being trivial. The interface is fluid and pleasant. The only drawback, at least for me, is the final hexagon: it is a quite annoying maze that makes the game less enjoyable. You have to stockpile lots of pieces (especially of some types) in advance and then hope they will last long enough. I think the game could be made better by somewhat relaxing that maze and making its pattern a bit more varied from a play to the next, same as the rest of the map.

Growth's mechanics are easy to learn, but hard to master, so I like its balanced difficulty. I enjoyed discovering ways to better manage my animals in the first areas so I could have enough for the volcano trek. While more variety in the procedural generation would be nice - the volcano area suffers the most from 'about the same every run' - I understand that the volcano is hard enough to balance around. Growth is an enjoyable experience as-is and well worth the price.

It's a guessing game not a "soft-strategy" game. There isn't really any problem solving past the basics of the game.

Not bad if on sale for under $5. Took roughly five plays to unlock all milestone-based content, after which it's a pleasant enough "reverse minesweeper": think of it as using mines to reveal tiles, and therefore needing to reveal more mines than you spend so that you can keep going. Would be nice if the order you find certain animals changes (to shake up the puzzle), and the game gets noticably easier once you unlock additional "points of interest" for each map (these not only reveal multiple tiles at once, they provide you with either a special animal as a one-shot boon or a sizeable number of regular animals to use). Still, glad to have tried it out and well worth the few dollars paid.