My Pleasure Grove

That was a sad day, wasn't it, the day we passed from elementary to high school. Life stopped being fun. Instead of getting breathless playing tag at recess, we hung out in shady corners of the yard talking about shady things. Life just got ... shadier.

Why didn't things continue the same as before? We used to sit on bright sunny chairs at bright sunny tables tables coloring bright sunny pictures with fat wax crayons. I can still feel the bits of wax-peel under my fingernails. Those days smelled of pencil sharpenings and sliced apple for snack.

Those days however got left behind. Zits came in, and with them came emotional chaos (or was it the other way round?) Still, that kindergarten part of me carried on regardless, hurtling disengaged like a comet through empty space, waiting for its moment to be finally traction-beamed back into orbit.

Decades later, that moment has arrived. I am once more sitting at a bright sunny table doing bright sunny things.

Thank you, Grove.

Grove does the impossible. It takes me back to seventeenth grade of elementary. It takes me back to how life would have been if adolescence hadn't intervened and taken me off track. It has me humming over bits of fruit, matching oranges and lemons to the bells of Saint Clement's while working out algorithms for exponential growth. It's citric pattern correlation, it's fruity localization, picking focal points and scheming around them while shoeing off a squirrel and coveting a wheelbarrow. It's university and kindergarten fused in one.

So where's the genius in this? Overlaying fruit patterns was never part of anyone's higher education, was it? But Grove is the perfect equation where enjoyment equals math times citrus squared. It's your daily fruit ration without the pips and the peel. It's sheer board gaming nutrition, the antidote for that fatal syndrome, Board Gamer's Fatigue.

BGF. Ever had that? It happens those days when you're drained by work, by life. You feel like playing a game, but nothing fits. You look at your games shelves, but those boxes just stare back at you. That collection you lavished your money on - turned into a dumb brick wall. Nothing grabs you, not even your favourites. Hassles of Burgundy? Stress Arcana? Forget it. Not today, thanks.

These are the moments for Grove. Your nerves are frazzled after a day at work. You need a bit of consolation, a refuge, a pleasure zone. Grove is all those things, at least for me.

In Grove I have found that refuge, that little comfort space between things, even between other games. A place where I can just drift off away from my anxious thoughts and disconnect, all while collecting imaginary fruit.

Playing Grove doesn't even feel like playing a game. I don't have to go through any mental process to justify the time investment. There hardly is any time investment. You just do Grove for ten, fifteen minutes, and then you do Grove again for ten, fifteen minutes. You do Grove until you have a taste of citric in your mouth, a tinge of satisfaction on your tongue.

Grove is instant nutrition. It's gaming vitamins and minerals. Here, the only extraneous element you'll be up against is a rather innocuous squirrel. You will enjoy the boost of a single, powerful wheelbarrow. Where fruits coincide, you will feel the pulse of nature, the rush of sap as your crop burgeons. Those fusion points will thrill with life, the promise of a bumper yield. Here, the wheelbarrow is your points crown, your growth trophy. You hardly mind the squirrel meddling on the fringe. Let it. It's all part of nature's process.

In short, Grove is one big wonderful excuse to disengage from life's affairs and engage with your inner fruit-tree world.

Yet the game is so fiddly, isn't it? The grove cards get easily nudged out of place, the dice constantly need rearranging, the cards get nudged again, you forget what numbers were on the dice before. It's weird, considering I spend the day battling my way through traffic, tackling piles of marking (schoolteacher that I am), hacking a path through emails. Fiddly exasperates me, fiddly gets on my nerves. How can the fiddliness of Grove actually soothe me? All that agonizing rearranging and replacing of dice - why isn't it truly agonizing? Why is it balm to my frazzled nerves?

Couldn't I embrace fiddliness the same way in other areas of my life? Why is Grove worth all the fiddliness?

Not sure. All I know is Grove is one game I can play even with the house in uproar all around me. Train a videocamera on me recording one frame per second, then sit back and watch the whole family skitting frantically around me like flies while I sit, head down, immovable, unperturbed, fixing my latest fruit harvest.

Only Grove and a couple other games can do that, can have me mesmerized, intact in my own little game space, tinkering with cards and dice while the world goes rushing trivially around me.

Grove centers me. If Cristiano Ronaldo, facing a freekick before millions, has his puffing, snorting way of shutting out the world, then I have mine. Grove is my shut-out.

Is it like dreaming?

They say dreams are the brain's way of filtering and ordering our cluttered thoughts. Is that what those neat rows of fruit do? Do they become my thoughts, willingly ordered, centered, maximized?

Whatever the case, I usually emerge from my immersion in Grove with a calmer outlook, like I've just been in therapy. No, I'm not ashamed to admit it. We all need a point of fondness. We all need to gaze at green till our vision goes blurred. I'm no different.

Just like anyone else, I need my pleasure grove.

Read this review in BoardGameGeek