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There is something quite peaceful about the idea of growing roses. You choose a few varieties, give them some care, perhaps add a greenhouse or fountain, and slowly turn a small plot into a beautiful garden. Rosalie starts there, but it doesn’t take long before things become more complicated. Your gardeners need wages, your roses need care, your big robots need electricity, and somewhere along the way you may have borrowed more money than was probably sensible.
In Rosalie, we’re horticulturists building rose estates over seven rounds. We plant basic and hybrid roses, expand our gardens, hire gardeners, automate some of the work, complete contracts and sell flowers. It looks rather friendly on the table, with pastel colours, wooden robots and roses everywhere, but there’s a fairly involved economic eurogame underneath. The question isn’t only how much you can build. It’s whether you can still afford to run the place afterwards.
A quick note before we get into it: Rosalie is currently on Kickstarter. We received a preview copy from publisher uchibacoya, so some components or details may differ from the final production version.
👥 1-4 players, ages 14+
⏳️ Playing time: 120-180 minutes
📝 Designers: Totsuca Chuo & Higabito
🎨 Artwork: Brownie120
🏢 Publisher: uchibacoya (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Rosalie is played over seven rounds, alternating between spring and autumn, with the game ending after a fourth and final spring. Each round follows the same general sequence. You develop your estate, care for your roses, let them bloom, complete contracts, sell flowers, grow seedlings and collect income. After the final round, everything is scored and the horticulturist with the most victory points wins.
Most of your development happens during the action phase. Everyone has an action board with rows containing different options. Players choose rows simultaneously and then resolve one of the actions there. You can buy roses, develop robots, build garden features, take contracts, expand your garden, add greenhouses or hire gardeners. There are also ways to improve your position in turn order or copy an estate action another player has selected. After a cycle, the action boards move between players, so the combinations in front of you keep changing.
The roses themselves are more than simple production cards. Basic roses come from a shared market, while hybrids require basic flower tiles and pollination wands. Roses differ in care cost, fragrance, flag, charm, blooming season and other properties that matter elsewhere in the game. Your garden only has so much room, although you can expand it with additional boards. Garden features provide another route for development. Unique features unlock character abilities and can score at the end of the game, windmills increase your electricity supply, and watermills provide different bonuses. Skill tiles add further abilities and benefits as you progress.
Once you’ve planted all these roses, you need to keep them alive. During the care phase, every planted flower needs enough care points. Gardeners are one way to provide them, while small and big robots can take over part of the work. Big robots need electricity when used, and shovels or certain abilities can also help. If a flower doesn’t receive enough care, it withers. That card is removed from your garden and will cost you seven points at the end. So yes, you can keep buying pretty roses. The game will eventually ask who exactly is going to water all of them.
Blooming gives you the flower tiles needed for several other parts of the game. Every planted flower blooms in spring. In autumn, two-season flowers bloom normally, while spring flowers can also bloom if they’re in a column with an activated greenhouse. Each greenhouse costs 2 electricity to activate. Flower tiles can be used to complete contracts or develop hybrids, while hybrid tiles can also be sold at the flower show. During the dedicated flower show phase, players take turns selling sets of three matching hybrid tiles for money or points. Each sale moves the corresponding buyer chip, changing what later sales are worth. There’s also an action during the main action phase that lets you manipulate buyers and make another sale.
Seedlings add another thing to plan around because they gradually mature and eventually need an empty plot. If there isn’t room when they’re ready, that can result in another withered flower. Income is partly determined by where your charm and award markers meet on the income chart, with abilities, skill tiles and watermills adding further benefits. Then there are gardener wages to pay. If you’re short on cash, you can take debt for more coins. Debt generates interest during autumn, and enough accumulated interest becomes additional debt. At the end, completed contracts, fragrances, abilities and the placement of roses around unique garden features can all score, while debt, interest and withered flowers subtract points.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
Rosalie looks much softer than it plays. The game mixes botanical illustrations of roses with pastel boards, slightly eccentric characters and small mechanical helpers. I like the contrast. One side of your estate looks like something from a gardening catalogue, while another has a robot standing next to a windmill because apparently we’ve moved beyond traditional horticulture.
The roses take up most of the space and come in plenty of colours and varieties, while the gameplay information sits around them without taking over the card. The boards use pale pinks, greens and turquoise, and there’s quite a bit printed on them. At first they look busy, but most areas have a clear purpose once you’ve played a few rounds.
There are also plenty of wooden pieces. Gardeners and robots are easy to recognise, as are the different garden features, windmills and watermills. Combined with the flower cards, they make your estate visibly change during the game. You start with something fairly modest, and a few rounds later you’ve somehow become responsible for an entire horticultural business with employees, machinery and questionable finances.
All of that needs space. Rosalie spreads out considerably once everyone starts buying extra garden boards and adding flowers, contracts and components around their player area. The central board isn’t exactly small either. It’s worth giving the game a proper table, especially with more players. The production looks good once everything is out, but compact it isn’t.
Our Experience
Our first game of Rosalie was very much an exploratory one. There is a lot asking for your attention, and initially we struggled to judge where our money and actions were best spent. Do we buy another rose? Hire another gardener? Invest in robots? Expand? Take a contract? Or perhaps do the responsible thing and keep enough money to actually pay everyone later? We understood the individual actions quite quickly, but that didn’t mean we understood what we should be doing with them. Remembering that a rose needs care is easy enough. Judging whether you can afford that care for the next few rounds was where we started slowing down.
Roses were probably the best example of how our thinking changed. At first, we mostly looked at price and what a flower could produce. Later, we started checking everything else before getting excited. Its care requirement, blooming season, fragrance, charm, flag and position in the garden could all make a difference. A rose that looked useful on its own could be rather pointless for the estate we’d already built, while another could help a contract, contribute towards a fragrance set and work nicely with one of our garden features. We also became more cautious about seedlings after discovering that buying something now could create a space problem later.
The rotating action boards also took a little time to click with us. During our first game, we mostly concentrated on whatever board was currently sitting in front of us. Later, we started watching what other players were choosing because that affected what would eventually arrive on our side of the table. Copying an action means another player rarely stops you completely, but paying extra because somebody got there first still hurts when money is already tight. That level of interaction suited us. We were getting in each other’s way rather than tearing down anything somebody had spent the previous hour building.
We underestimated passing as well. It didn’t sound particularly exciting, so naturally we ignored it until someone started collecting useful bonuses and getting better turn order while the rest of us wondered why we were suddenly behind.
More importantly, our gardens started getting us into trouble in different ways. One player hired gardeners quite freely and then discovered that employees have the annoying habit of expecting wages. I went further into automation, which helped with care but made electricity more important than I’d expected. Another garden simply grew too quickly. We also learned that producing more flowers isn’t enough by itself. You need somewhere useful for those flower tiles to go, whether that’s a contract, another hybrid or a sale. Once we started thinking about the destination before increasing production, our gardens became considerably less chaotic.
Debt caused probably the most discussion. In our first game, we treated another debt tile as something to avoid whenever possible. Later, we became less afraid of borrowing. Sometimes those coins let you make an investment exactly when you need it, and waiting can be worse than taking the debt. The difficult part is knowing when to stop and when to start paying it back. We had several moments where someone proudly cleared part of their debt and then realised they’d left themselves almost no money for the next turn. By then, the main question for us had changed from “what can I add to my garden?” to “how much more can this garden actually support?”
Our Thoughts
After a few games, what stood out most was how often fixing one problem created another. A new rose might help with a contract and complete a fragrance set, but it can also increase your care requirements or occupy a plot that a seedling will soon need. Hiring another gardener can deal with the care problem, but now you have another wage to pay. Developing automation might be the alternative, but that costs money too, and using big robots asks for electricity. Rosalie has a habit of turning one solution into the next expense.
That’s also why I wouldn’t really describe it as a straightforward engine builder. You certainly produce more as your estate develops, but producing more flower tiles only helps if you have somewhere useful to send them. A contract may need them, you might be working towards another hybrid, or you may be preparing a flower show sale. Otherwise, you’ve spent actions and money increasing production without solving much. After a while, we stopped asking how much more we could produce and started asking whether we actually needed any of it.
Roses need care, employees expect wages, greenhouses extend seasonal production but consume electricity, and borrowing lets you expand before you can really afford it. I mean, none of this is particularly relaxing once you’re the one paying for everything.
The funny thing is that Rosalie doesn’t really look like a heavy economic game. It’s colourful and friendly, with beautiful roses and small wooden robots, but there’s quite a demanding game underneath. Choosing a rose can mean checking its care cost, fragrance, charm, blooming season, available garden space and whether any of your features care where you plant it. Doing that occasionally is fine. Doing it across an estate full of roses for two or three hours can become tiring, especially if you don’t enjoy comparing several consequences before making a move.
There are practical drawbacks as well. Our games have taken around two to three hours, and Rosalie needs a generous amount of table space once everyone’s estates start spreading out. The first game was noticeably slower, and even once everyone knows what they’re doing, this isn’t something we’d choose when we only have an hour or don’t feel like concentrating. We also wouldn’t make any strong claims about the balance between the asymmetrical characters yet. We’ve already seen the characters push us towards different parts of the garden, which is one reason I still want to try the one I haven’t played. But we’d need considerably more games before judging how those approaches compare.
What I like most is that adding something to your estate isn’t automatically an improvement. There’s usually another rose you could plant or another part of the garden you could develop, but Rosalie keeps asking what you’re actually going to do with it.
If you prefer shorter eurogames or games where you can mostly focus on one thing at a time, Rosalie is probably going to feel like work. There are evenings where I wouldn’t want to keep track of all this either. But with the right group and enough time, we really enjoyed figuring out how to keep everything running. There are still different ways we want to approach the garden, which is probably the best indication of where we ended up with it.
So yeah, I’m happy to go back to the roses. Maybe next time with fewer gardeners, slightly more electricity and, ideally, fewer emergency loans.
📝 We received a preview copy of Rosalie from uchibacoya.
