Royal Joker

Royal Joker is a puzzle about the question every gardener eventually asks: the tree flowers beautifully every spring, so why ❓ does it never set fruit? The answer is almost never the tree itself — it is who is standing next to it. Each plot hands you an orchard, a hive and a small bench of varieties, and asks you to plant the partners that will actually work.

Every rule on the board is a real horticultural one. A tree needs a different variety of its own species in reach, and their blossom windows have to overlap — an early apple and a late apple are simply never open at the same time ⏱️. Bees fly in straight lines, so a hedge can cut a perfectly good partner off completely. Triploid varieties like Bramley carry no viable pollen at all: they take two partners and give nothing back. Some varieties are self-fertile and need nobody. Run the season and the plot answers you honestly — blossom opens, bees fly the legal routes only, and each tree either sets fruit or stands bare with a written reason ❓ why.

Sixty hand-designed plots move from a single missing partner through overlapping bloom windows, hedged flight lines, triploids and a frost row that strips early blossom before a bee can reach it. Twelve inverse puzzles fix the trees and ask you to place the hives instead. A frost trial runs five plots back to back with three re-plants, a new ✨ plot arrives each day, and a composer lets you build 🔨 your own board and check ✅ it against a real solver before you keep it. Royal Joker also keeps an almanac of seventeen varieties with their true bloom groups, ploidy and self-fertility, plus a pairing bench where any two can be stood side by side to see 👀 whether they would work each other.

There is nothing to wait for and nothing to buy. If you want, you can photograph your own garden corner and lay a plot over the picture to see 👀 what would actually fruit there — but every puzzle in Royal Joker works completely without it.