Wouter & Ymke 
If you’ve ever stopped to look a little closer at a garden, you’ll know there’s far more going on than flowers and grass. Under the Leaves takes that idea and turns it into a tile-laying game where you’re creating a home for bees, hummingbirds, and all sorts of tiny woodland creatures hiding beneath mushrooms, leaves, and puddles. It starts with a single garden tile, but by the end of the game you’ve built a colourful little ecosystem that’s completely your own.
It certainly looks like a cosy family game, and in many ways it is. But after our first few turns we realised we were spending much more time looking for combinations than simply building a pretty garden. More than once we stared at the same tile, rotated it four times, flipped it over, and still weren’t convinced we’d found the best spot. Apparently gardening involves more optimisation than we expected.
👥 2-4 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 25-40 minutes
📝 Designer: Trevor Benjamin & Brett J. Gilbert
🎨 Artwork: Paulina Victoria
🏢 Publisher: Fractal Juegos (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
In Under the Leaves, every player builds their own garden over twelve rounds. On your turn, you choose one of the three available garden tiles, add it to your tableau, and then check whether your latest addition has attracted any new wildlife. The player with the most creatures living in their garden at the end of the game wins.
Each type of creature arrives in a different way. Bees appear when you create a new pollinated area by connecting at least three matching terrain spaces. Hummingbirds are attracted once every terrain space on a tile belongs to pollinated areas, and lining hummingbird tiles up in rows or columns can bring in even more. Alongside those are the woodland dwellers. Every game uses one randomly selected leaf, mushroom, and puddle objective, so the patterns you’re trying to build change slightly from one game to the next.
After placing a tile, you simply work through each type of creature to see whether you’ve met any new conditions. Sometimes nothing much happens. Other times a single tile suddenly attracts bees, makes a hummingbird appear, and completes one of the dweller objectives all at once. Those turns are always satisfying because they feel like your garden has finally clicked into place.
Although everyone builds their own garden, players all draft from the same market of three tiles. That small decision space creates just enough interaction to keep an eye on what everyone else is building. Occasionally you take the obvious tile because it’s exactly what your garden needs. Occasionally you notice someone else’s expression when you pick it up, and that’s all the confirmation you need.
The rules themselves stay straightforward throughout the game. What changes is the size of your garden. Early turns usually take only a few seconds, while the final rounds ask you to scan a much larger tableau to see everything your latest tile has changed. That’s also when players who enjoy finding every possible point may spend a little longer deciding.
After twelve rounds, players score all of their bees, hummingbirds, and dwellers. Players with the majority of each dweller type receive bonus dweller pieces before the final count, and the player with the most creatures wins.
Artwork & Components
The first thing that caught our attention was the artwork. Under the Leaves has a warm storybook style that fits the theme perfectly. Flowers, ponds, mushrooms, leaves, and tiny creatures all come together without making the table feel cluttered. As everyone’s gardens grow, it becomes surprisingly enjoyable to look around the table and see how differently they developed from the same starting point.
The wooden pieces are easily my favourite part of the production. Instead of cubes or discs, you get little wooden bees, hummingbirds, and woodland dwellers that gradually populate your garden. They’re colourful, easy to recognise, and simply satisfying to place. I mean, it’s hard not to smile every time another tiny bee moves in, even if it’s technically just another victory point.
The tiles are sturdy, double-sided, and easy to read throughout the game. Terrain types stay clear even once gardens become much larger, and the dweller cards explain the three active objectives without needing pages of reminder text. The cloth bag rounds everything off nicely. Nothing feels overproduced, but nothing feels like an afterthought either.
Our Experience
Our first impression turned out to be slightly misleading. Under the Leaves looks like a gentle family game about building a beautiful garden, but after a couple of plays we realised its real focus is optimisation. Every turn asks the same question: how much value can we get from one tile? We rarely followed one long-term plan from beginning to end. Instead, we found ourselves constantly reassessing the garden, rotating and flipping tiles, and trying to find placements that could achieve several things at once. The game rewards flexibility far more than sticking to an idea you had three turns earlier.
Our favourite turns were the ones where everything suddenly lined up. We’d place a tile expecting it to attract a single bee, only to realise it also completed a hummingbird tile, fulfilled one of the dweller objectives, and left another opportunity waiting for the following round. Those little chain reactions never stopped feeling satisfying. After a few games, we realised spotting those opportunities is really what Under the Leaves is asking players to get better at.
Our own approach changed quite a bit over time. During the first game we mostly chased whichever reward looked easiest to score. Later, we stopped thinking about bees, hummingbirds, and dwellers as separate objectives and started looking at the garden as one connected puzzle.
We also liked how often the game pushed us towards adapting instead of becoming frustrated. With only three tiles available each round, the one you really want often isn’t there. Some of our highest-scoring turns actually came from tiles we initially dismissed because they didn’t fit the plan we’d imagined. We simply stopped trying to force that plan and started asking, “What can this tile do instead?” More often than not, the answer surprised us.
Interaction stays fairly light, but we paid more attention to the other players than we expected. The shared tile market means every choice changes the options for everyone else, and towards the end of the game we occasionally picked a tile partly because we knew somebody else wanted it. Nobody admitted to doing that, of course. We all just happened to notice when the perfect tile mysteriously disappeared.
The final rounds naturally became a little slower because every placement affected several different scoring systems. We found ourselves checking the same corner of the garden twice to make sure we hadn’t missed anything. That became easier with experience, but players who enjoy finding every possible point will probably take a little more time before committing to a placement.
One thing we hadn’t expected was how satisfying the ending would be. Every player begins with almost exactly the same garden, yet by the final scoring every tableau looked completely different. Before putting the game away, we usually spent another minute looking around the table at everyone’s little ecosystems. Somehow that ended up being one of our favourite parts of the game.
Our Thoughts
Under the Leaves isn’t trying to surprise players with brand-new ideas. Instead, it asks the same question over and over again: can this tile do more than one job? The more we played, the more we found ourselves looking for placements that solved several problems at once rather than chasing individual rewards. That’s where the puzzle became most enjoyable for us.
Teaching the game was also refreshingly straightforward. Nobody struggled with the rules after the opening turns. The conversations around the table quickly stopped being about how the game worked and became discussions about where a tile should go. That’s a nice place for a puzzle game to end up because everyone is solving the same challenge, just in different ways.
That doesn’t mean it’ll suit every group. If you enjoy games where players are constantly getting in each other’s way, this probably won’t offer enough interaction. Likewise, players who enjoy planning several turns ahead may find the shared tile market a little restrictive. You’re usually reacting to what’s available rather than waiting for the perfect tile to appear, and whether that’s enjoyable will come down to personal preference.
We also think most groups will have a good idea of what the game offers after a handful of plays. The random dweller objectives change what you’re looking for in the garden, but the overall flow stays familiar from one game to the next. We didn’t really mind because the enjoyment came from trying to build a better garden than we had last time, not from expecting the game itself to change dramatically.
We’d happily introduce Under the Leaves to newer players because it’s easy to teach, but we’d also bring it to a game night with friends who enjoy spatial puzzles and don’t mind spending an extra minute searching for one more combination. It became the sort of game we were happy to bring back to the table because building another garden was simply enjoyable. The final scores mattered, of course, but the thing we remembered most was taking one last look around the table and seeing four completely different gardens that had all started from the same single tile.
📝 We received a review copy of Under the Leaves from Fractal Juegos.
