Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com —and let us know what you think.

Sometimes, as serious gamers living through a golden age of board game invention, you want to sit down to a three-hour cardboard extravaganza of cards, dials, miniatures, tokens, custom dice, and two-volume rulebooks.

But other times, you just want to play something fun that doesn’t involve 20 minutes of set-up—and something that your mom can understand. Cottage Garden is precisely that game, an hour’s worth of gentle, intuitive loveliness in a box.

Game details Designer: Uwe Rosenberg

Publisher: Edition Spielweise

Players: 1-4

Age: 8+

Playing time: 45-60 minutes

Price: $62 (Amazon)/ Uwe RosenbergEdition Spielweise1-48+45-60 minutes: $62 (Amazon)/ £31 (Amazon)

Designed by German board game auteur Uwe Rosenberg as the spiritual sequel to his 2014 two-player game Patchwork, the new Cottage Garden is a tremendously simple, tremendously enjoyable game of Tetris that depicts herbaceous borders instead of Russian Orthodox onion domes. Players take on the role of gardeners in a bucolic fantasy land of eternal summer and sleeping cats, using a range of polyominos—that is, irregular cardboard shapes up to six squares in size—to build up their own personal cottage garden.

You score by completing flower beds, six-by-six grids each strewn with a random scattering of flower pots and glass planters that must be kept visible as you place flowers and watering cans around them. The pieces are sumptuously watercolored by Andrea Boekhoff, and the art makes it a pleasure to fit everything together. Undoubtedly, though, the best part is using tokens representing sleeping cats to fill in the last few spaces just in case, as often happens, you can’t quite fit any of the shapes. More games—perhaps every single game?—should feature cat tokens.

The scoring system is unexpectedly sophisticated. Players each have one scoring track, but each player has six cubes to track points (three representing plant pots, three representing the more valuable planters). You can only move one cube per garden scored, and there’s a leap on each track (from 14 to 20 points) between the last two slots on the track, which forces you into clever accountancy so you don’t overcommit to scoring with one cube and waste the pots you've painstakingly accumulated on your latest garden. This is where the mental crunch comes; the best players can plan out several rounds in advance based on the shapes they to need to optimize their boards.

Tom Mendelsohn

Tom Mendelsohn

Tom Mendelsohn

Tom Mendelsohn

Tom Mendelsohn

Tom Mendelsohn

Tom Mendelsohn

The pieces themselves are stacked on a 16-square grid and are selected by a large green die, representing the head gardener, which moves around the board. This allows for some level of prediction and some level of frustration, as you watch your turn continually miss the L-shaped piece that would sew the game up nicely for you. The remaining pieces stay in a queue off to the side, selected in order by a brilliant if totally superfluous cardboard stand-up of a wheelbarrow. The little details are everything in this game—it’s fun because everything’s just so nice.

For all its simplicity, Cottage Garden isn’t just for casual gamers. I’ve played it with some of my most grognardy pals, either as a warm-up before a session of something heavy or as a palate cleanser between bouts. There’s something viscerally satisfying about fitting a particularly complex shape perfectly around all its obstacles to make a display that’s somehow more than the sum of its parts.