First Fruits 2026

First Fruits is a hand-watercolored card game celebrating 40 real fruit varieties across four seasons: apples, peaches, pears, and cherries. Each card features an original watercolor painting of a specific fruit cultivar along with educational information about that variety. The game captures the joy of orchard harvesting, with players racing to build their harvest faster than their opponents.

Players begin with ten cards in hand and take turns either playing a card or drawing from the deck. The game board consists of three diamond-marked spaces arranged in a triangle, each displaying two different fruit types. To play a card, a player must match the fruit shown on an existing card in that space and play a higher-numbered card. If a space is empty, the player simply matches one of the two fruits displayed on the diamond marker. When the deck runs out, players shuffle the discard pile to create a new deck. Special wild cards add strategic depth: the +2 card forces the next player to draw two cards, spinning arrows reverse the direction of play, and arcing arrows skip the next player's turn. After any wild card effect resolves, all cards in that space are sent to the discard pile. The game teaches quickly in approximately two minutes and plays in roughly fifteen minutes.

The first player to play all cards from their hand and achieve an empty hand wins the game immediately. Victory requires both strategic card management and tactical positioning at the three harvest spaces, balancing when to play high cards, when to draw, and how to use wild cards to disrupt opponents' momentum.

—description from designer