Plotalot is a brilliant card drafting, collection game all about planting, growing, and harvesting delicious veggies. But there are also pesky pests who want to disrupt your digging plans!

How To Play

Each turn you may take up to two (different or the same) actions per turn:

You can:

• Lay down a plot (brown card). Everyone has certain sized plots which you can plant the 8 varieties of vegetables into and these brown beds are always highly prized!
• Plant a vegetable in a plot. Veggies have potential point values which can be enhanced depending on companion placement (shown as coins on the cards).
• Add an enhancement (blue) like trowels and other kit to help boost the veggie points and powers!
• Play an attack card (red) on an opponent to meddle with their planting plans! Pests come in all shapes and sizes and effects!; and/or
• Discard a card onto the compost heap.

Plus, before taking your two actions, you can Harvest (using a purple card) a plot to free up space for more veggies. Then, once harvesting and the actions are done, draw your hand back up to five cards from the veg pile or the random mix of enhancements, plots, attacks, and harvest action cards.

The game ends when one of the two draw decks is depleted. Then players take one final turn and add up the points they have been gaining over their turns. The winner is crowned the most fabulous farmer!

We really enjoy Plotalot! There’s alot more fun, take that tactical style gameplay than we were expecting! The pests and actions all link well to the agricultural theme. I love the Helpful Hedgehog who valiantly fends off attacks! Plus, having cards that can help and benefit you as well as those which straight up fiddle with your farming foes brings a nice balance – the cards that temporarily protect your plots from attacks are particularly useful! Each turn you’ve got to weigh up your actions – plant veg, harvest now, go pick on someone else’s plot, or focus on your own farm. And sometimes, discarding a card into the compost is a key way to refresh your choices for the next turn.

The artwork is super and the components in PLOTALOT including the deck boards are lovely. They are printed on responsibly sourced materials and the game doesn’t include any single use plastic either which is great to know. I also really like the companion planting and giant vegetable scoring potential which bring added decision dilemmas and strategy to each turn. It also means that no two games ever play out the same which is great for replayability, and the actions help mitigate the luck of the draw!

I’m sad there’s no solo mode but that’s only because I would like the opportunity to play it more! PLOTALOT is a colourful, clever, card drafting collection game that let’s us flex our mean farmer muscles in a really fun way!

This blog was written by Favouritefoe