Year: 2022 | Players: 2-5 | Min: 50+ | Ages: 11+
This Paint the Roses review was made after playing the game more than 10 times, with at least one game played at the two-, three-, and four-player counts.
What is Paint the Roses?
Paint the Roses is a cooperative deduction game set in the world of Alice in Wonderland. As royal gardeners, you’re tasked with keeping the Queen of Hearts happy by decorating her garden.
Paint the Roses was designed by Ben Goldman and is published by North Star Games.
Rules Overview
In Paint the Roses, you and your teammates must finish the royal garden while trying to figure out the Queen’s ever-changing whims.
Each player always holds a secret Whim card and your goal is to place Shrub tiles in the garden to uncover clues about everyone’s Whim cards. Whim cards come in Easy, Medium, and Hard, each offering different levels of challenge and rewards for correct guesses. You can discuss theories about other players’ Whim cards, but you can’t talk about your own.
The key to winning is correctly guessing each other’s Whim cards. This moves your team forward on the score track and keeps you ahead of the Queen.
Turn Structure:
- Place a Tile: The active player takes one of the four Shrub tiles from the Greenhouse and places it on any open spot in the garden. This helps reveal clues about your Whim card and those of your teammates.
- Place Clue Tokens: After placing a tile, everyone checks it against adjacent tiles to see if there are matches with their Whim cards. Everyone then places Clue tokens on the new tile for each match they have. For example, if you have a card that shows a yellow flower next to a red flower and the tile that was just placed has a yellow flower and is now touching two red flowers, you’d put two tokens on it.
- Guess a Whim Card: The team must guess at least one player’s Whim card. If the guess is correct, you move forward on the score track, return the Clue tokens to their owner, and can optionally keep guessing. An incorrect guess ends this phase immediately.
- Move the Queen: The Queen moves forward based on her speed. If your guess was incorrect, she moves twice as fast. If she catches up with the Gardeners, she beheads them, and the game ends. Each time your team passes the White Rabbit on the track, the Queen moves faster on all future turns.
- Replenish: Draw new Whim cards if needed, add a new Shrub tile to the Greenhouse, and pass the Greenhouse to the next player.
You win by completely filling the garden with Shrub tiles without getting caught. You lose if the Queen ever reaches or surpasses the Gardeners.
In a two-player game, you get three unused Clue tokens and can use them during the game to skip the Guess a Whim Card phase. The Queen will then move but without the penalty of guessing incorrectly.
Check out our Top 10 Family Games!
Pros and Cons
Pros
- The deduction puzzle itself is a lot of fun. There’s a lot of stuff to work through, but it doesn’t hurt my brain like some other deduction games. Which shrub did the player play? Which ones did they decide not to play? Who played Clue tokens? I’ve enjoyed working through those problems with my teammates.
- One of my favorite moments in Paint the Roses is when the team makes a random guess and it turns out to be correct. Since you have to make at least one guess every turn, even when you don’t have any Clue tokens to work with, sometimes you just have to do the best you can with the little bit of info you do have. That’s a lot of fun and gets some big-time “Wahoos!” when you guess correctly.
- I like how challenging this game is and how most games go down to the wire. My main group is just okay at deduction games, so our win percentage in this one is pretty low, but we usually feel like we at least have a chance to pull off the win.
- It’s very satisfying when you strategically place a tile that helps multiple players. That’s been pretty rare for us so far, but when it does happen we temporarily get to feel like we’re great at deduction games!
- The theme of trying to fill in a garden before the Queen of Hearts can catch up to you and chop your heads off is just… random and hilarious. I can tell the mechanics came before the theme was attached to this one, but I still really like this wacky theme.
- Paint the Roses looks fantastic on the table. The board looks great, the tiles blend with the board nicely, and the miniatures look good on the track.
Cons
- Paint the Roses isn’t as good when you have a mix of skill levels at the table. You want everyone to at least be pretty close in deduction skills to avoid quarterbacking and/or frustrated players.
- To me, two-player games just aren’t as fun as games with three or more players. I like having more people to work with in this one and more options when trying to connect shrubs. The one big plus of the two-player game is that you can’t run into those quarterbacking issues, but otherwise, I just think it’s better with more people.
- This is minor, but you can run into “poor poker face” issues or players just having a hard time controlling their reactions to what other players are saying. That kind of stuff makes me laugh, but it could be a problem for groups that take winning and playing “fairly” more seriously.
Final Thoughts
Paint the Roses isn’t quite like any deduction game I’ve played before, and I’ve had a fantastic time playing it. Winning always feels great, but to me, that’s secondary to just having a good time giving clues and working with my teammates to make semi-educated guesses. This is one of those games that will move in and out of my group’s gaming rotation, but I know I’ll always like seeing it up on the shelf because we’ve already made some pretty great memories while playing it.
I’ve heard that the modules in the expansions add a lot to the game, so I will be checking those out at some point.
I think Pain the Roses is a must-try if you enjoy challenging deduction puzzles. While some might like it as a two-player game, I think groups of three or more will get the most out of it.
Paint the Roses Links
BGG | Amazon | Miniature Market
Thanks for taking the time to read our Paint the Roses review!
Be sure to also take a look at our Best Cooperative Board Games list and the other board game rankings.
Subscribe to our newsletter if you want more co-op board game content sent right to your inbox!
