Sometimes, as serious gamers living through a golden age of board game invention, you want to sit down to a three-hour cardboard extravaganza of cards, dials, miniatures, tokens, custom dice, and two-volume rulebooks.

But other times, you just want to play something fun that doesn’t involve 20 minutes of set-up—and something that your mom can understand. Cottage Garden is precisely that game, an hour’s worth of gentle, intuitive loveliness in a box.