review: It’s Time To Plant The Beans

hello all! i wanted to review one of the games from a bundle i'm participating in, the Cozy TTRPGs Bundle (link). ahead of time, i wanna point out that this bundle is $164 worth of games for $20; it's a really good opportunity to sample a whole bunch of cozy creations and support their authors at the same time. so please check it out!

the game i'm going to be reviewing today is It's Time To Plant The Beans (link) by sprintingowldesigns (@sprintingowl), which is about planting beans to grow feline friends.

part of the reason It’s Time To Plant The Beans made me really excited to check it out was bc it was the first time i found smth that recognizes how fun it is just to play nonsense games with dice. it was part of what motivated my own game in the bundle, bovine borough: it’s fun to roll dice and ascribe fleeting meaning to it.

what It’s Time To Plant The Beans does is it uses dice as the primary, if not the only, medium of play. dice represent the progress of your cats growing from underneath the soil, but they also represent rainy days that help your crops grow, or the gusts of wind that tear your crops down. the physicality of the game makes it so fun and charming to play, and it makes the accomplishment of stacking a tower of seven dice all the more satisfying. and the versatility of it all! the different ways to use dice and interpret them! i love it.

i also wanted to take some time to gush over the layout and design of the game itself. look how cuuuute!!! the pleasant pastoral background and the cute little photos of cats just makes this book a pleasure to read through, beyond it being instructions for how to play. if i had a coffee table, i would love to have a book like this sitting on top of it. the vibes are just immaculate.

if you like to invent little dice games or to think about kittens and their little toe beans, you're going to love this game! it really made my day reading it the first time :)

there’s so many other cute and sweet games in this bundle! please check it out and support all these artists and writers, because it will also help us all to develop even more works.