Gardenscapes - Match & decorate garden

Welcome to Gardenscapes—the first hit from Playrix's Scapes™ series! Solve match-3 puzzles to restore a wonderful garden to its former glory!

Embark on an adventurous journey: beat match-3 levels, restore and decorate different areas in the garden, get to the bottom of the secrets it holds, and enjoy the company of amusing in-game characters, including Austin, your butler! What are you waiting for? Build your dream garden!

The game features:

* Unique gameplay: swap and match, restore and decorate the garden, and enjoy a novel storyline—all in one place!

* Hundreds of unique match-3 levels

* Dozens of in-game characters you can make friends with

* A lovely pet that is always there to cheer you up

* An in-game social network you can use to keep up on all the latest

* Different areas in the garden with unique structures: broken fountains, mysterious mazes, and many more

* A community that comes first—become neighbors with your Facebook friends!

Gameplay Breakdown

Garden scapes is a game that contains elements from simulation games, matching games, and time management games. Gameplay is divided into two main sections: Jumble Sale and Tending the Garden. Jumble Sale is a hidden-object game where the goal is to find items in a pile of stuff to sell in a rummage sale. The better you do in a round of Jumble Sale, the more money you will receive at the end.

This money is then used in the other half of the game, Tending the Garden. When tending the garden, the money you’ve earned from Jumble Sale goes into buying things and making repairs to the garden. This part of the game is more free-form, with a lot of room for customization. The relaxed, Zen-like atmosphere of the garden mixed with the more intense Jumble Sale gives Gardenscapes a balance of challenge and substance, with the result being fun!

Jumble Sale

The jumble sale is necessary to gain the funds required to begin construction of New Eden. Your grandfather was a bit of a hoarder in his later years, and it seems most of his fortune was whittled away by his obsession with collecting trinkets and doo-dads. Fortunately, since everything in the mansion now belongs to you, this excess junk can be turned into capital. In order to facilitate this, you have to go to each room and find objects hidden in a large pile to find something specific for a customer.

A typical round of Jumble Sale will start when someone asks for a single small item, such as a teddy bear. Your goal is then to try and find the object in one of the many junk piles in each room. Successfully obtaining the desired object in a reasonable amount of time will complete the transaction, and your reward will be money and a cleaner living space!

Tips and Tricks for Jumble Sale

~ If you’re stuck and can’t find the object a customer is looking for, press the hint button in the bottom-right corner of the screen. This will reveal the object you’re looking for, but be mindful: you only have a limited number of hints per level.

~ If you’re still stuck and have run out of hints, a great strategy is to start clicking wildly all over the screen. There are no negative repercussions for clicking the wrong objects, so the fastest and most efficient way to play Jumble Sale is to rapidly click your mouse while moving the cursor all around the screen, pausing occasionally to collect the money left on the side.

~ Another thing to keep in mind if you run out of hits is that there are extra hints hidden in some levels. Keep your eyes peeled for a question mark symbol somewhere in each room and you can get back some of those valuable hints, which can also be turned into bonus cash if you don’t use them in a round.

~ Don’t forget to check the side of the screen occasionally. This is where you’ll see what items customers are looking for and how much they are willing to pay. Once you’ve found an object, the customer will leave the money on the sidebar as well.

~ Be sure to grab money left by a customer as soon as possible: the sooner you collect money from the sidebar, the sooner another customer can take their place. Keeping a steady flow of customers is paramount to making money and getting rid of all the clutter.

~ The longer you take to help a customer find the object they’re looking for, the more impatient they will become. Every customer has three hearts next to their portrait, and those hearts will disappear if you take longer than they like to help them. The color of their portion of the game screen will change in color from green to yellow and then finally to red, and some customers may simply walk away if they don’t receive help after that point.

~ If you’re playing on Timed Mode, helping all the customers quickly will earn you more money if you have a lot of time left over. Playing on Relaxed difficulty will keep you from having that stressful time constraint, but the tradeoff is you’ll miss out on the extra money bonus if you complete the round faster.

Tending the Garden

Tending the garden is your reward for your hard work selling all that junk to strangers. With the money you’ve earned after completing a level, head outside to the garden and you will find yourself faced with many options. There are a variety of repairs and additions to be made, and several different ways you can approach them.

Use the money you’ve earned to purchase items from the bar at the bottom of the screen. Once you’ve selected a category, select the part of the garden you wish to place the object. Now, you will have a few options to choose from. There are no wrong answers here: just pick whichever looks best to you!

Tips and Tricks for Tending the Garden

~ While you do start off the game with a decent selection of items to choose from with a good level of variety, you should play a few more levels before making any hard decisions. Completing levels will unlock more options to decorate your garden, as well as giving you more money to buy them with!

~ Don’t worry if you find something you like but already have a similar object in your garden! You can always swap out the look and type of object in each section of the garden, so feel free to keep things fresh by mixing it up a bit. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

~ Austin doesn’t really have much to do but walk around the garden and talk to himself. You can cheer him up a little by clicking him when he walks around: he’ll tell you it’s bothersome, but you can tell he appreciates the attention.

~ If you’re feeling especially proud of your garden, there is an option in-game to convert it into a screensaver for your computer. Now, every time you go to wake up your computer you can see a little glimpse of paradise.

Locations

Gardenscapes takes place entirely in your grandfather’s mansion, with the garden in the front yard. This may sound boring, but there is actually plenty of variety in the mansion, with many different rooms filled with things you can sell to rubes to pay for fertilizer. Here are some of the rooms you’ll encounter in Gardenscapes:

Drawing Room: Once a lavishly decorated and supremely comfortable lounge area for guests to sit by the fire, this room is completely filled with clutter. Picking up all the food and silverware is only a part of the issue: there are also clocks and small bits of machinery everywhere for some reason. Perhaps Grampa fancied himself a bit of a tinkerer in his late life, but one thing’s for sure: he can’t do any tinkering now. Sell it all!

Garage: This garage houses Grampa’s once beastly Ford Automobile. While it’s gathering dust now, there was a time when it saw plenty of action in numerous street races. Now, someone’s jammed a pair of scissors into the grill and used the hood to showcase their collection of musical instruments. The car is salvageable, but the microscopes and guitars and Thermoses all need to go, so let’s start the bidding!

Office: When it was at its most impressive, the mansion required quite a bit of upkeep. The office used to be a place where Grampa could keep track of all the goings-on and plan out his garden, but since his later years and eventual passing it has become covered in dust and clutter. Clearing all the children’s toys, noisemakers, cooking utensils and food will be arduous, but the resulting cash flow will make it all worthwhile.

Bathroom: Not any mere washroom, the mansion’s bathroom features an elegant marble bathtub with beautiful golden knobs. Now, someone has filled the tub with dishes, and there are papers and small electronics everywhere. Putting aside the fact that you need the capital from selling these things to pay for the construction of your garden, this bathroom desperately needs to be cleaned just for safety reasons.

Bureau Room: This room houses a beautiful bureau full of Grampa’s prize porcelain dolls. These intricately hand-painted figures were the apple of his eye towards the end of his life, but now you’re in charge. What may have been an impressive collection in his lifetime is now a collection of creepy little girl toys that stare unblinking at passersby, so it’s time to sell the lot!

Garden: This is what makes it all worthwhile. The garden planted in the front entry way of the mansion has many paths with which guests can wander to enjoy the beautiful plants and flowers contained within, with a beautiful water fountain in the center. However, deteriorating health and decline in value of estate has caused the garden to fall into severe disrepair, meaning the fountain doesn’t work and the paths are overgrown with weeds. Only you can fix it up, restoring its former glory.

Gardenscapes is free to play, though some in-game items can also be purchased for real money.

Enjoying Gardenscapes? Learn more about the game!