Gardens

Gardens
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Victory
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Base
Illustrator(s)	Matthias Catrein
Card text
Worth 1  per 10 cards you have (round down).

Gardens is a Victory card from the Base set. It is worth 1  for every 10 cards in your deck, so it is valuable when your deck has many cards and worth very little if you have trashed most of your deck.

It is the simplest of the "scaling" alt-VP cards—i.e., those that are worth victory points scaled in proportion to some property of your deck.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• For example, if you have 37 cards at the end of the game, each copy of Gardens you have is worth 3 .
• Use 8 copies of Gardens in a 2-player game, 12 copies for 3 or more players.

Other rules clarifications

• Gardens counts all the cards belonging to you, including cards you have in play, cards that you have set aside, and cards on your mats, in addition to those physically in your deck at the end of the game.

Strategy

Gardens is the first example of alt-VP that most Dominion players will experience. Alt-VP generally provides an advantage to engine strategies versus more Treasure-oriented strategies through an indirect mechanism: While the simpler, Treasure-oriented strategy can often get an early lead on Provinces, the engine strategy often tries to compensate by getting additional non-Province sources of   such as Duchies after building their deck to a state where they are gaining more than one card per turn. This is because buying Provinces may risk causing the game to end before the engine player has regained a points lead, so the engine player needs to diversify their sources of  . In this context, Gardens provides another source of  , which is particularly valuable in engine decks with gainers like Workshop which both lead to large decks and allow for the easy acquisition of Gardens.

That being said, the advantage to engine strategies that Gardens provides is typically not very large. Gardens is often just a Duchy that costs . In some engines with heavy trashing, Gardens can result in even fewer   than Duchy. Thus, Gardens is primarily valuable in engines that feature very large numbers of gains or where Gardens costing allows it to be gained significantly more easily than Duchy.

Occasionally, Gardens is a centralizing card that enables a non-engine strategy called a rush. In the Base set, this is typified by the Workshop-Gardens rush. To play this strategy, you try to first gain all the Workshops, then gain all the Gardens, and finally end the game with a   lead by emptying a third pile (often Estate). This strategy is very rarely the strongest available strategy because Workshop is a weak gainer. Many Workshop variants perform similarly, but there are a few like Groom which can make this strategy very powerful.

Even more rarely, Gardens can be centralizing for strategies that aren’t rushes, most notably Beggar-Gardens, where players try to make Gardens worth more   than Province.

External strategy articles

Note: Article(s) below are by individual authors and may not represent the community's views on cards, but may provide more in-depth information. Caveat emptor.

• theory's 2010 article

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		Worth 1  for every 10 cards in your deck (rounded down).	Dominion	October 2008
		Worth 1  per 10 cards you have (round down).	Dominion (Second Edition)	October 2016

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Chinese	花園 (pron. huāyuán)				Gardens is mislabeled as an Action.
Czech	Zahrady
Dutch	Tuinen			Elke 10 kaarten in je stapel zijn aan het einde van het spel 1  waard (naar beneden afronden).	Tweede editie (herdruk 2019/2020)
Finnish	Puutarha (note: singular)
French	Jardins
German	Gärten			Wert 1  pro 10 Karten (abgerundet) im eigenen Kartensatz.	2. Edition (2019)
Greek	Κήποι (pron. kepoi)
Hungarian	Park (lit. park)
Italian	Giardini
Japanese	庭園 (pron. teien)			あなたのカード10枚 (端数切り捨て)につき 1 。
Korean	정원 (pron. joeng-won)
Norwegian	Park (lit. park)
Polish	Ogrody			Ta karta jest warta 1  za każde 10 kart w twojej talii (zaokrąglając w dół).	(2015)
	Ogrody			Ta karta jest warta 1  za każde 10 kart, które posiadasz (zaokrąglając w dół).	II Edycja (2018)
Romanian	Grădini
Russian	Сады (pron. sady)			Приносит 1  за каждые 10 карт, которые у вас есть (с округлением вниз).
Spanish	Jardines			Consigue 1   por cada 10 cartas que tengas (redondeado hacia abajo).	First Edition (2008)
	Jardines			Consigue 1   por cada 10 cartas que tengas (redondeado hacia abajo).	Second Edition (2016, 2021)

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

Originally the main set had a different special victory card. I swapped this in, taking it from the 6th expansion, because this one was less narrow - there are more "tables" (sets of 10 kingdom cards) that make Gardens a viable strategy. At one point Valerie put this on a list of cards she thought could leave the main set, but I defended it and she didn't fight it.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of the Dominion Cards

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