Garden Master

Do the arithmetic once and the whole design falls out of it. Each of the five plants sheds about two points of water a second, so the board as a whole is losing ten. One round trip, barrel to shelf and back, runs about six seconds and puts perhaps fifteen points into a single pot. You are behind, permanently. The garden is not something you keep alive. It is something you slow down, and the score is just a record of how long you managed it. My best was sixty-six seconds.

Two things nobody tells you. Tapping space does nothing at all, because pouring only happens while the key is held. And up and down are not steps between shelves but smooth movement, so it is entirely possible to stand at the right place along a shelf, hold space, and pour into thin air because you are hovering a few pixels too high to count as next to the pot.

Warnings you actually get

A small badge in the top left corner shows the icon of whatever is coming and counts down from three. A flame is a heatwave. A gopher means something is about to burrow into one of your pots, with a prompt telling you to get close and tap to whack it. A sun is a sunbeam. Three seconds is not enough time to prepare for any of them, but it is enough to decide which plant you are willing to give up.

Golden seeds come in at roughly two a run, and the shop wants four for a bigger can, fifteen for a faster gnome and forty for a combo shield. The upgrades that would change the arithmetic above are a long, long way off.