Tend

IV Studio · 2025

Editing, German edition

“...based on this experience, we will be coming back again in the future.” This one’s what the publisher dubbed a “flip-and-write” game, which is an evolution of roll-and-writes. So instead of rolling dice and noting results in a table or filling in patterns based on your rolls, here you flip cards that inform your in-game actions. The game is themed around building and TENDing a farm on an alien planet in order to fulfil quotas for a company called Zenith. The artwork is suitably original (which is pretty much IV Studio’s thing). There’s a large variety of actions available, from planting crops to building animal enclosures to chopping wood, mining, and fishing. For most of these, you use dry-erase markers on your tableau board, woodcutting and mining use scratch-off cards. Mechanically, it’s a low-interaction engine builder in which players work towards final scoring. Although Tend isn’t what I’d call a heavy game, it still has a lot going on, with lots of little parts to its overall engine. There are lots of cards, each of which comes with its own little thematic touch, so I had fun polishing the translator’s chosen wording to help the theme shine through more strongly. It’s this kind of transcreation work I really enjoy best. We also spotted a few inconsistencies between the rules and cards and cleaned up gameplay examples, which the publisher really appreciated.