Everyone works together to grow six different fruits. Every rotten fruit must be plowed before any seeds can be planted. Once a seed is planted, it must be watered, fertilized and exposed to light. Once all these conditions are met, it can be harvested. Cards used on a fruit that has been harvested are not shuffled back into the deck.
Every player has a shared pool of life points called Freshness. Freshness rises and lowers with certain actions and cards. Burying a card, drawing Fruit Fly pests, and Bird pests without the listed resource all reduce Freshness, while using resources raises Freshness. The team begins with 25 Freshness and the game is lost when Freshness reaches zero.
A player can play as many cards as he or she wants to, and ends the turn by drawing one card. if the player chooses, one card can be buried into the bottom of the deck and one card is drawn without ending the turn, but this costs the team one Frehshness.
Pests are cards that are automatically played once drawn. Pests have three kinds of effects. They can affect resources, reduce Freshness, and mess with players' cards. Fruit flies attack players by reducing Freshness by certain amounts. Birds remove resource cards from plots, and if none are in play then it is removed from the player's hand. If neither the field nor the player's hand, then the player loses five Freshness. Mice, called Mouseys, force players to do unwanted things with their hands like giving cards or shuffling the whole hand into the deck. No matter what the pest is, if a Repel card is not used, the pest is placed at the bottom of the deck.
Repel cards show scarecrows, and can prevent any one pest card from taking effect. If a Repel card is used, both it and the Pest are shuffled into the deck. This allows pests and Repels to be redrawn later on, but it also minimizes prediction of the deck.
There are cards that allow for resource manipulation. One is the Weather Forecast card which determines if a special resource card is light or water. The Forecast card is flipped over to determine this when the weather is changed. In addition, there are two Shopping cards that allow for the player to search the deck for any resource card and put it in his or her hand. However, the deck is shuffled afterwards and the player's turn immediately ends.
Because this is a cooperative game, talking and showing hands is encouraged. Alternatively, teams can be formed and only a smaller number of fruits need to be farmed to win. It can be played solo if desired!
