I love farming games. I grew up working on farms, and there is a special kind of bucolic pleasure that comes from tilling the earth without actually having to till the earth. Farming and gardening are actually very difficult, and as my graveyard of houseplants can attest, it’s best if this aspect of my life is kept in the realm of fantasy.
Three Sisters: Harvest Edition is a re-release of the roll-and-write game Three Sisters, where you manage a little farm and grow various vegetables and fruits. It’s charming and well-executed, though it is still essentially a game where you check things off on a pad of paper, so if that’s not your jam, it’s not going to blow your hair back.
Checkboxes: this time, with plants
Three Sisters comes out the gate strong. This isn’t a roll-and-write for the weak-wristed. There are two notepads for you to scribble on. One features a large garden area with a whole bunch of boxes, while the other has your orchard/shed area, which houses upgrades and special powerups (AKA berries and trees).
Each round, all of the dice are rolled and placed in same-numbered groups, starting from a wooden pawn and going around the spaces of a circular track that I won’t call a rondel because it’s just a circular track with actions on it. You don’t manipulate the dice, except for one element (compost), which I’ll come back to in a minute. Each player then takes a die, interacts with the die-numbered area of their garden, and does the action of the space they took the die from. This can be done in any order, and compost (dots on one of your pads) can be consumed to change the value of the die, which in turn determines which area of your garden you can interact with.
The garden part is the most fun part. Basically, the number determines which area of your garden you can do stuff in, and you decide to either plant or water. Planting is placing the first mark at the bottom of a given column within an area (you do this twice), while watering causes everything that has been planted to gain a mark above it. You want to grow each “plant” to the top of its column because that will give you points at the end of the game.
Everything else is, how do you say, combeaux?
Combo! Combo! Combo!
Virtually everything else in the game is checking off other boxes and triggering various combos. There are boxes that, when checked, give you upgrades, which typically come in the form of more box checking. There’s even a series of boxes (little goods) that, when checked, reward you with the ability to check off more things.
What you end up with is a critical path puzzle, trying to determine the best order to check off the various boxes to maximize both efficiency and scoring—the essential nature of the genre. It’s fluid and enjoyable, and it does what it says on the tin. The Harvest Edition offers a series of additional scenarios and challenges to explore, which is great. Many of the scenarios encourage you to break up the typical pathing of the game for different rewards, which is solid. There’s a few that have annoying little groundhogs you have to contend with, a new pad to explore, and some others. I have no complaints there. My exemplar of the genre is The Guild of Merchant Explorers, but if you’re looking for a pleasing computational puzzle, Three Sisters won’t disappoint. Don’t expect to leave knowing more about permaculture; The One Straw Revolution this ain’t, but it’s nice to check some corn and bean boxes.
Three Sisters: Harvest Edition details
- Designer: Adam Hill, Ben Pinchback, Matt Riddle
- Artists: Aaron Wood, Andrew Bosley, Beth Sobel, Marlies Barends
- Publishers: 25th Century Games, Motor City Gameworks
- Release Date: 2026
- Player count : 1 - 4
- Age range : 12+
- Time range : 30 - 60 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Dice Rolling, Paper-and-Pencil, Scenario / Mission / Campaign Game, Solo / Solitaire Game
- BGG Geek Rating: 8.13309 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
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