How to play Moonsown: rules and how to read the borders
Everything you need to play Moonsown, plus tips to get a better score.
How to play
- Grow exactly the garden in the drawing (the small picture in the corner), using as few seeds as possible.
- Pick a flower in the tray and tap bare soil to sow a seed there. Tap a seed again to pick it up. You can only sow or pick up seeds in the morning, before the first night.
- Then tap “Let the night pass” (you need at least one seed). Exactly three nights pass, one at a time; the three moons at the top light up as they go.
- Every night, at the same moment for the whole garden, bare soil next to flowers of a single kind turns into that kind: one square a night, up, down, left or right, never diagonally. A seed counts as a flower from the start.
- The edge of the planter stops the growth. In three nights a flower reaches at most three squares from its seed: soil farther from every seed stays bare.
- All seeds grow on the same nights. Patches of the same kind simply join up, with no gap between them.
- Soil that two or more kinds reach on the same night stays bare forever: it becomes a border (cracked soil). Borders, stones and bare soil pass nothing on.
- Two kinds can also touch with no border: when each one takes its own square on the same night, neither can take the other's square afterwards.
- Stones (mossy rocks) appear on most days, and every day from Tuesday. Nothing grows on or through them, and you can't sow on them.
- After the third night your garden is compared with the drawing. If it matches at par, you win. With more seeds a Finish button appears: hand it in, or go back to the morning and keep trying. If it doesn't match, squares with a red dashed outline show what differs.
- “Back to morning” takes the garden back to before the first night. Your seeds stay where they were, so you can move, add or pick up a few and try again.
- Each flower has its own shape and symbol, used in the drawing, the tray and on the stake of every seed: sunflower (sun), tulip (heart), lavender (spike), daisy (star).
- Mondays and Tuesdays bring two kinds of flowers, Wednesday to Friday three and the weekend four. The gardens grow from 5×5 on Monday to 7×7 at the end of the week.
- Bare squares in the drawing must stay bare in your garden (a border or soil no flower reached both count). Tap the drawing to lay it over your garden: symbols show which kind goes where, white outlines what must stay bare.
- At the top right: seeds sown and par. Tries counts how many times you reached the third night.
- Par is the fewest seeds possible. Match par for ⭐⭐⭐, par + 1 or + 2 for ⭐⭐, anything more for ⭐. Tries don't count.
- Your shared result shows your seed count, par and the drawing in emoji (🌻 🌷 🪻 🌼 flowers, ⬛ bare soil, 🪨 stones), never where you sowed.
- On a computer: arrow keys move around the garden and Enter sows or picks up; keys 1 to 4 pick a flower, N lets a night pass, M goes back to the morning and D shows the drawing on the garden.
- Garden sounds and vibration can be turned off in Settings.
Strategy: read the borders
The bare strips in the drawing are not random holes. A bare square with two different flowers around it is a border: it is exactly where two growing flowers arrived on the same night.
So a border sits halfway between two seeds. If a strip of bare soil runs between sunflowers and tulips, the sunflower seed and the tulip seed are the same number of steps away from it, one on each side.
Two different flowers touching with no border between them also arrived on the same night, from seeds at equal distances. A seed placed right next to another kind would have turned its neighbour into a border.
Bare soil next to only one kind of flower means that flower got there on the third night, too late to spread further. Count three steps back from it to find how far away its seed is.
A flower patch grows three steps in every direction from its seed. One seed can cover a diamond of up to 25 squares, so large patches often need only one well-placed seed; long thin ones need more.
Stones block growth. A patch that wraps around a stone may need its seed on the far side, or a second seed.
Start with what is certain: the patches of a single kind boxed in by borders. Then count distances between borders, sow, and let the nights tell you where you were off.