Grow a Garden is shockingly simple, but that's also kind of the point.
I fear Grow a Garden’s entire premise was ruined for me less than 30 minutes in when I was given a gigantic watermelon by another player, which then turned out to be worth 800,000 sheckles. I was still barely scraping 1,000 from my handful of strawberry and blueberry bushes, and in a flash the joys of ‘number go bigger’ had been felled at the hands of a kind stranger.
Even before this point, I couldn’t quite understand what it is about Grow a Garden that’s caused it to become one of the most popular experiences on Roblox right now. When I was playing it during an early weekday afternoon, the Roblox app claimed to have 3.2 million people growing and cultivating their own non-denominational toy brick farms, with over 10.1 billion visits since it launched in late March.
It’s one of the many tycoon-esque games that have been growing in popularity across platforms like Roblox and Fortnite’s user-created islands as of late. The premise is simple enough: grow crops, sell them, buy rarer and more expensive crops, watch the number go higher and higher until you get bored.
There are sprinklings of RNG elements to keep things more enticing. Mutations can do things like turn your boring red strawberries into rainbow ones, or transform regular carrots into golden (more expensive) ones. They can stack, too, and as I walked along some of the more developed gardens I was greeted with gigantic multi-coloured coconut trees and glowing cacti.
I got to see a few of these on my own farm in the time I played. Tiny chromatic fruits and ones that remained soaking wet even after a rainstorm had dried up, all things that would multiply how many sheckles I’d receive for selling them. I wasn’t quite rocking the dazzling, towering multi-coloured displays of my fellow farmhands, but it was still neat to see the RNG tick over in my favour.
It’s not just crops, though. I was also able to get my hands on a few eggs while I played which, when hatched, would birth a random pet. I’m not sure what kind of animal is able to lay an egg that may lead to two types of dogs or one rabbit, but I chucked a couple on the ground and 10 minutes later was greeted with two little puppies.
Now, I will admit that Grow a Garden did get me here a little bit. I was really banking on that 33.33% chance working in my favour and blessing me with a bunny… which it did not. Did I buy another egg after that? No, because they cost 50,000 sheckles, and I had somehow successfully pissed away almost the entirety of my 800,000 melon winnings on sprinklers to make my crops grow faster and increase the rate of RNG-related dopamine rushes. Listen, I’m a gacha gamer, it was going to get me one way or another.
As I closed out of the game, I sat back and wondered what about it had so successfully raked in over 10 billion visits in a matter of months. It didn’t look particularly pretty, or have much going on for that matter.
But honestly, I think that’s kind of the point. Grow a Garden is an all-timer when it comes to ‘brain off’ games—ones you can boot up and essentially second screen while watching Twitch streams or YouTube videos. It just about straddles the line between tedious clicking, those sweet mutations, and the entire ‘number get bigger’ thing without having to put much work or thought in to see that happen.
It’s chill, and there’s almost no way for your progression to backslide or hit a wall. Players can pay Robux—Roblox’s premium currency—to steal your crops, and the seed shop is some kind of demented gacha of its own which sees only one or two rarer seeds stocked every five-minute rotation.
So at worst you get someone with a destructive streak spending real money to steal your precious crops, or you end up waiting an age for a seed you want to finally show up in the shop. But from what I can gauge, that’s the extent of the friction I’ll ever experience in Grow a Garden. For the most part, I can mindlessly click on my crops, teleport straight to the stall to dump them all for cash and then do it all over again.
Is it the type of tycoon game that’ll keep me going back over and over again for the foreseeable? Not particularly, but clearly it’s hitting with three million other folk enough to be doing just that. I do sort of want to try and grow a gigantic tree though, so who knows? Maybe that temptation will get the better of me and you’ll catch me AFK farming with macros before long.
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