Graft

IV Studio · 2025

Translation, English to German

Graft takes place in the same universe as Tend. In fact, it looks suspiciously like the very same planet. This time, however, you play as the freight haulers getting goods ready for shipping back to Zenith HQ (wherever that is). Zenith, of course, is a finicky customer who wants their freight arranged just so in the various containers. Players each get a hand of cards with goods and play a single card to a steadily growing row in front of them. Each card comes with certain scoring conditions and, more importantly, may restrict what kind of cards you’re allowed to play to the row from now on. Your hand always includes a card that lets you ship your row, scoring points and clearing your play space for the next row. The interesting twist is that, once everyone’s played their single card, all players pass their entire hand along clockwise. This makes planning ahead difficult and keeps everyone on their toes. This wasn’t a big job in terms of translation, but I did get to choose the names for all the goods and actions in the game, which was fun. It also helped that I’d worked on IV Studio’s flip-and-write title Tend before this.