Zone Five: A New Little Garden Puzzle
I made a new game, and this one is close to my heart. It’s called Zone Five, and it’s a little gardening puzzle set right here in our corner of Wisconsin. If you’ve ever looked up your hardiness zone, you know we sit in USDA zone 5, which is a polite way of saying our growing season is short and the frost always shows up sooner than you’d like. That’s the whole game: plant a garden and try to carry it from the spring thaw all the way to first frost.
You get twelve turns on a 5×5 plot. Each turn you pick a plant from your hand and choose a square to put it in. Every square has its own light and soil, from full sun down to shade and from dry dirt to damp, and every plant has its own preferences. A sunflower wants open sun. A hosta would rather sit in the shade. Match the plant to the spot and it settles in happy. Force a sun lover into a shady corner and it just sort of sulks.
Then you let the week pass, and the weather does what Wisconsin weather does. A soft rain is a gift to the thirsty plants. A hot week is rough on anything that likes it damp, unless you tucked it in the shade of something tall. A firefly night rewards pollinator flowers that are sitting next to each other. And at the very end, first frost comes for everything tender while the hardy natives just shrug it off. You’re reading a forecast and planning a few weeks ahead the entire time.
There’s a new garden every day, and everybody gets the same one, so you can compare notes with a friend. There’s also a practice mode that deals you a fresh random season any time you feel like poking around. The weather comes out different every time, so no two gardens play out quite the same way.
The scoring rewards the things a real gardener cares about. Right plant, right place. Good neighbors planted together (tomatoes really do like basil nearby). And connected patches of pollinator flowers, the kind of thing that actually brings the bees in. Chase a high score if you want, or just build something that looks nice and makes it to fall in one piece.
It runs right in your browser, on your phone or your computer. Nothing to download, nothing to install, and no ads. You can play the whole thing with a mouse, a finger, or the keyboard, and there are a few quiet garden sounds if you want to turn them on. It even has a “how to play” card built in, so you don’t need to know any of this ahead of time.
A short season, and a lot of hope in March. That’s about the truest thing I can say about gardening up here, and now it’s a game too. If you like it, there’s a whole shelf of these over on the games page. Go plant something.
