Wouter & Ymke 
A small patch of land slowly turns into a proper countryside. A field appears, then a garden, perhaps a barn, and before long there are fruit trees, animals, crops, and people all trying to be useful at the same time.
Countryside looks welcoming, with its hand-painted artwork and familiar farming theme. Underneath that presentation is a game about fitting cards into limited areas, deciding when your workers should return home, and keeping enough coins and baskets available. It sounds straightforward, but it doesn’t take long before you’re staring at one apple, two empty baskets, no coins, and a very ambitious plan involving sheep.
👥 1-4 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 60 minutes
📝 Designer: Peter Prinz
🎨 Artwork: Alizée Favier
🏢 Publisher: Nanox Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay overview
Each player starts with a personal board, four workers, a supply of coin-and-basket tokens, and a hand of project cards. You also draw five area cards and choose three as the starting areas of your countryside. Before anyone places a worker, you already need to decide which areas and cards are worth keeping.
On your turn, you either place a worker on a free action space on your own board or end your day. The starting actions let you collect cards, play project cards using sunlight, gain a new area, or complete up to two goals. As goals are completed, markers are removed from your board, revealing more actions, rewards, and abilities. Your board starts with a limited selection, but gradually offers more ways to use your workers.
The shared display contains seven project cards. Some actions let you take several adjacent cards, and the first and last cards also count as adjacent. So, yes, the row is secretly a circle. A very flat circle, but still. You’ll often take one card you really want together with a few that feel more like paperwork, although those extra cards can still be discarded for sunlight or sold for coins.
Project cards are played into meadows, houses, barns, fields, and gardens. Each card has a sunlight cost and must be placed in the correct kind of area. Every area has limited room, so playing a card isn’t only about its immediate effect. You also need to consider the symbols it adds, the goal printed on that area, and whether you may want the space for something else later.
Sunlight can’t be divided between cards. Five sunlight can’t be used for one card costing three and another costing two. You may spend coins to increase the amount, with each coin adding one hour. This makes a card’s cost important beyond simply deciding whether you can afford it, because a card that fits one of your available sunlight actions is much easier to play than one that regularly asks for extra coins.
Money, storage, and production all use the same limited supply. A farm with many coins can afford extra sunlight but may have little room to store goods. A farm full of produce may be close to completing goals but have almost no money left. You may even turn a filled basket into a coin when no empty baskets are available, although the stored good is lost. Sometimes that’s still better than watching your plan fail because one grape refuses to cooperate.
Project cards produce goods, convert resources, provide coins, or activate other parts of your countryside. There’s no general harvest phase, so most effects happen only when you choose to trigger them. As more cards enter your farm, their abilities begin supporting one another and a single action can become much more useful than it was at the start.
Most points come from completing personal goals on your area cards and shared goals in the centre of the table. These may require goods, coins, animals, people, symbols, full areas, or certain card combinations. When you complete one, you place a marker beside it, receive any reward shown, and move forward on the victory point track. Every player may complete each goal once, so another player reaching a shared goal first doesn’t remove it from your plans.
Instead of placing another worker, you may end your day. All spent workers return home, and your benefit depends on how many come back. One gives nothing extra, two gives one market action, three gives a market action and a card, and four gives two different market actions.
Market actions let you draw a card, refresh the display, sell three cards for three coins, or sell goods. Some project cards also return a spent worker home. That worker becomes available again, but it won’t count towards your end-of-day benefit unless you place it once more. Nobody said farm work came with generous labour conditions.
The game ends when someone moves beyond the final space of the victory point track. Every player, including the person who triggered the ending, then gets exactly two more turns. The player with the most points wins, with coins breaking a tie.
Artwork, components, and visual design
Most of the box is filled with project and area cards, supported by personal boards, wooden workers, goal tiles, markers, and the double-sided coin-and-basket tokens. The game is card-driven, but the illustrations give the growing countryside plenty of presence on the table.
Each project card has a hand-painted illustration by Alizée Favier. The animals, crops, workers, trees, and buildings use soft greens, yellows, reds, and browns. The style is warm without becoming too cute. The sheep look friendly, but they don’t look as though they’re about to start singing.
As your countryside grows, the cards form a pleasant little landscape in front of you. It isn’t one continuous picture because the cards still need room for symbols and effects, but the same painted style holds everything together across the large deck. A chicken, a vineyard, and a farm worker all clearly belong to the same place, even when they’re sitting in different areas of your tableau.
The iconography is fairly clear once you know it, although there’s a lot to learn. During our first game, the reference cards spent very little time resting, but the consistent layout made everything easier to find after a while. The player boards are practical, showing your workers, tokens, covered actions, and remaining rewards, while the constantly flipping coin-and-basket tokens make it easy to follow the state of your farm.
Nothing feels overproduced, but everything is easy to use and looks like it belongs together. Once several cards are in play, each player has a countryside that feels personal without the table becoming difficult to read.
Our experience
In our games, Countryside started more slowly than expected. The first turns were mostly about collecting cards, placing a few projects, and preparing something that might become useful later. After several rounds, the cards began supporting one another and the same four workers could suddenly achieve much more. Seeing that change was enjoyable, although reaching it took some patience, especially while we were still learning the symbols.
The choice of when to end the day was one of the parts we enjoyed most. In one game, I used another worker simply because I could, then realised I would have been better off ending the day and taking a market action straight away. From then on, I started checking the end-of-day benefits more before placing each worker.
The limited room in each area caught us out as well. We played some cards because their immediate effects looked useful, then discovered that we had made an area goal difficult or left no room for a better card. In one garden, I filled every space and then drew exactly the card I wanted there. The garden was finished, the card was homeless, and I had nobody to blame except past me. Later games went better once we stopped treating every empty slot as a space that needed to be filled immediately.
The shared display regularly changed our plans because cards are often taken in adjacent groups. Sometimes that led us towards combinations we hadn’t considered, while at other times an important card disappeared before our turn came back. This was easier to manage at two players, while three added more competition without changing everything between turns. Four still worked, but more cards disappeared and the game took longer. Three was probably our preferred count.
The final two turns mattered more than we first expected. Triggering the end didn’t settle the result, because a prepared player could still complete several goals. In one game, ending the game gave another player exactly enough time to finish their best remaining objectives. After that, everyone paid more attention to what the other farms had ready before moving beyond the end of the scoring track.
Our thoughts
The coin-and-basket system gives Countryside most of its own character. You need money to extend sunlight actions, but you also need baskets for production. Neither side is simply better, and having more of one means having less of the other. Producing a lot isn’t automatically useful either. A basket of apples, milk, or grain only helps if you can spend it, convert it, or sell it.
I also like how goals affect future turns, although I’m not fully convinced every unlock will remain equally useful after many plays. Experienced players may develop a preferred order, and someone who knows which spaces to reveal first may gain an advantage over a new player. It doesn’t guarantee a win, but mixed-experience groups may notice that difference.
The shared goals are fairly forgiving because everyone may complete them once. That supports the low-conflict style, but it can also make them feel more like common assignments than prizes players are trying to claim. Most competition comes from taking useful cards and watching when somebody may trigger the ending, rather than from blocking another player’s board.
Strategically, it seems better to build around one main direction without depending on it completely. Fruit, grain, livestock, and other families can support related cards, but full specialisation may leave you unable to complete goals that ask for variety. Sunlight costs matter as well. A strong card that regularly needs extra coins may be harder to support than a cheaper card that fits your available actions.
Worker placement, tableau building, set collection, and resource conversion will all feel familiar, but the shared coin-and-basket supply gives Countryside a character of its own. We’d place it in the medium-weight range. The turns are easy to follow, though card placement, sunlight, storage, and goal requirements give you plenty to consider.
It will suit players who enjoy developing their own tableau without much direct interference. Some early unlocks may give experienced players an advantage, but that concern didn’t outweigh what we enjoyed. The resource system remained important until the final turns, and completing a plan felt rewarding because several parts of the countryside had to support one another. We’d happily play it again, especially with two or three players.
Sometimes success means a countryside full of animals, crops, and workers. Sometimes it just means finally having the correct number of eggs, and that can feel just as good.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Nanox Games.
