The gardener’s guide

Getting through the gate

To open a seed packet you need a free account. We ask for four things only: a nickname, an email address, a password, and a tick to say you are an adult living in the UK. We never ask for a card because there is nothing here to pay for, and there is no confirmation email to wait on. If you change your mind, one button on your account page removes the lot.

Your purse of Play Credits

Every new gardener is handed 100,000 Play Credits. That single purse, together with your level and your garden notebook, travels with you into every glasshouse. The credits are imaginary. Nobody can buy, sell, withdraw, transfer or swap them, and whatever you collect in a game is worth nothing anywhere else. The purse refills itself in several ways:

• A free handful of credits lands every four hours.
• Daily jobs around the garden pay out credits.
• Each new level brings a reward.
• Drop under 2,000 and the purse is refilled on the spot, free.

The garden plan and the notebook

The garden plan shows all 35 games laid out in 6 glasshouses. Drag it around, zoom into a bed and tap any seed packet to open it. The little flag on a packet copies that game into your garden notebook, which is stored in your browser. Think of it as a pressed flower between the pages: a noted game unlocks nothing and earns nothing.

Reading the weather

Each game carries a weather label describing how it paces itself. We work it out by running the game’s own code for millions of spins and counting how often a spin pays back:

Treat the weather as a description of temperament, never as a forecast for the spin you are about to make.

What the features do

Paylines, in brief

All games share the same frame: five reels, three rows. A line wins when matching symbols run from the leftmost reel towards the right along one of the fixed paylines. Your stake is shared equally between the lines, and each line pays only its best win. Scatters are the exception — they pay wherever they land, as a multiple of your total stake.

Where the luck comes from

Behind each reel sits a fixed strip of symbols. On every spin your browser’s random number generator picks a fresh, independent stopping point on each strip. What happened before has no bearing on what happens next, and the games never adjust to your purse or to how long you have been at it.

Numbers we measured ourselves

The table below comes from spinning each game’s actual code millions of times. These figures concern pretend Play Credits in free games only and tell you nothing about any game played for money.