Orchard Almanac

Six rows wide, six rows deep, and one year to make something of it. Every week you roll two dice and decide, before you read anything, which one is the sun and which one is the rain . Sun is a row. Rain is a column. That choice picks the cross you may plant on — and it picks which of two entries you get out of the thirty-week almanac, because sun 4 / rain 2 is a different week from sun 2 / rain 4. In January that is an easy call. By week fifteen, with a plum you are protecting and a row one tree short, it is the hardest sentence in the game. Apples, pears, plums and walnuts go in one at a time, wherever the ground will take them. Water has to be dug to them, one segment at a time, and only when the week grants you a dig. Blight lands on the crossing, and at the end of every season it spreads to one adjacent tree of the same kind — so the tidy block of one variety that scores so beautifully in December is also exactly how you lose August. Twenty-four rolls, four seasons, about half an hour. Alone you play the score bands; with two to four people everyone works the same roll on their own sheet, and because each player names sun and rain for themselves, one roll grows four completely different orchards. What's in it: Ten pages, as two separate PDFs — A4 and US Letter, laid out for their paper rather than scaled A two-page rulebook with worked diagrams, and a full page of seasonal rules The thirty-week almanac as a single readable 6×6 grid, doubles on the diagonal A scoring page with a whole finished year worked through in pencil Two cut-out reference cards for the table Two score sheets: the standard hillside, and a harder second-year orchard with three trees already standing and two plots of stone Twelve one-off achievements in the margin of every sheet You need two six-sided dice and a pencil. Nothing else. Original game, original artwork, no licensed material.