Technically, Tend is in the flip & write genre of games. That is to say that every round 5 cards are flipped over (actually 2 of them are flipped a round earlier, so you can see what is coming). Every player independently chooses 2 of these cards, and performs the action from that card. In round 1, there are only very basic cards, which contain the 4 fundamental actions the game has: Tending, fishing, chopping, and mining. Over time more and more cards with a second part are added to the game: First do a basic action, and if you fulfill a certain condition, you get an additional reward. As you see the upcoming cards in advance, and they get reshuffled with the basic cards once the deck is empty and thus come back, you can try to prepare and be able to fulfill the condition in order to have better turns in the future.

The "write" part of the genre means that you don't represent goods or items in the game with any sort of meeple or cardboard token. Instead you mark it with a pen on printed sheet of paper. There are a lot of roll & write or flip & write games in which that piece of paper is relatively simple, sometimes no more than a grid on which you then draw a map (Cartographers) or a network of railways and roads (Railroad Ink). But Tend is much more complex, comparable to games like Hadrian's Wall. But Hadrian's wall uses a mix of meeples and printed pieces of paper you write on, while Tend doesn't have any meeples at all (but it has dice you rotate to represent plants and animals).

Thematically, Tend is like a cozy game, a paper version of games like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing. You collect resources, which you can either sell, or use to craft improved tools that make your actions better. Once you think your tools are good enough, you concentrate on shoving the resources in your cargo bay, where they will score you victory points. You also gain victory points by achieving intermediate objectives, which are different each game, and badges, which are not. As tools don't give victory points, the trick is to know at which point to switch from using your resources to improve your tools to producing cargo. The action selection mechanic, with just 2 actions per turn and just 12 turns, means you need to optimize to get as much done as possible.

The overall result is that the gameplay of Tend strongly resembles typical Euro board games that aren't flip & write. In fact, I am pretty certain that you could theoretically design an alternative Tend game that has exactly the same rules and gameplay as  flip & write Tend, but uses only meeples and tiles and cards as game materials, with no writing at all. Which brings me to the philosophical discussion on why Tend would choose to represent its game elements with paper you write on, instead of with reusable game components. Because the consequence is that Tend can't be played forever, at some point you'll run out of the preprinted sheets and scratch off cards. There are ways to replace stuff, even print sheets yourself, or use an app instead of a physical scratch off card. But out of the box Tend is a game in which you use up game components while playing and throw them away at the end. And some people strongly dislike that aspect.

If you think of our theoretical Tend the Euro game with meeples, tiles, and cards, and you look at the actual printed sheets used to play Tend, you realize that the printed version is smaller, and a lot faster to set up. For example for mining and chopping each player has a scratch off card with two areas of 7 x 8 squares. They are random, and you could achieve the same effect with tiles, but that would mean you need to set up 112 tiles per player randomly at the start of each game, which certainly would take a good amount of time. In the printed version, these squares are also just 8 mm x 8 mm small, which for cardboard components would be rather fiddly. Those mining / chopping areas and the cargo bay area in a game with cardboard tiles would probably have to be bigger. Drawing a shape on paper, or using the stamp side of the pens in the deluxe version, is also a lot faster than finding the correct cardboard tile. I recently played Covenant, a board game I bought at Essen, and really didn't like the long setup of cardboard components and meeples at the start of the game. Tend in cardboard is theoretically possible, but in reality impractical, expensive, and cumbersome.

But besides the practical advantages of sheets of paper to mark game states, there is also the haptics of it. The scratch off cards are fun because not so many games use them. In the deluxe version of Tend, the stamps on the colored pens are fun because not so many games use them. There is just an inherent pleasure in scratching off spaces or stamping shapes into your cargo bay in Tend that feels unique at this point in time. Having said that, the system certainly has disadvantages, and I'm not just talking you ending the game with colored pen markings on your fingers. The small size of the squares is sufficient for the player sitting in front of the sheet of paper; but in a multiplayer game, even just looking at the paper in front of the player next to you, isn't likely to give you a complete picture of his state of the game. And normally you could / should play Tend simultaneously instead of consecutively to not make the game take too much time. Which means you look even less at what the other players are doing, and Tend quickly turns into a multiplayer solo game, where everybody is just playing for themselves with very little interaction between players. Which is an inherent issue in roll/flip & write games. On the positive side, it makes Tend more suitable for solo play than many others of the board games I own.

I very much like Tend, both as a solo game, and for small groups. I am not very worried that I can't play the game forever, because (200 divided by player count) is still a large number, and I don't think I ever played any board game that often. It is possible that the haptic fun of scratch off cards and stamping with colored pens will fade over time, but right now it feels innovative and unique. Pricing of Tend is somewhat weird. I paid $99 for the deluxe version, plus another $50 for VAT and shipping. But with the standard version costing $69 plus VAT plus shipping, I feel that the deluxe version was well worth the slightly higher price. If you bought the standard version and than bought the stamp pens and extra sheets separately, you would pay a lot more. Admittedly there is an advantage of the standard version coming in a smaller and lighter box, as the deluxe version is rather big and heavy if you need to transport it. It is very possible that 100 copies of everything is enough, and the pencils last longer than the stamping markers. Well, I'm happy with my deluxe version. The only component I still upgraded was a longer scratch off tool with a smaller tip, but I had that already for a previous legacy game with scratch off components.