Garden Stones

Make the biggest deck and get massive points and money.

I feel like this deck is counterintuitive. The vineyard requires you to play a lot of actions, and a lot of these are not. Also, the Gardens requires a larger deck, but you have the Island which thins it out.

Island counts as points 3 ways, along with nobles and great hall if you have Gardens and Vineyards. Only 3 of these are not actions. It was a lot of fun and created huge scores. You could probably break 100 points with this setup but one of us ended because we thought ahead of the other.

Yeah, just realized that the island does in fact come back to your deck at the end. Dunno what I was on the other night. My apologies.

This looks like a great combination. I'll have to give it a try next time I play.

I like games that involve thinking out the strategy (like this one) instead of just rushing for the money and then provinces. I did a similar build with Gardens and Dukes and I ended up with 94 victory points at the end (I won). The lowest score in the game was around 50 or so (it was a 3 player game). I'll have to try this one!

My husband and I played this one tonight, and we found that we had to have a strategy before we made rash purchases. There weren't enough cards that had extra Buys, so we think we would probably swap Island for Wharf next time I play it. It might also make the game run a little quicker, as this took a while.

If you do go vineyards, pawns are nice: they're cheap, and they don't hurt you're deck at all (since you can just use them as +1 card, +1 action each time)