After using the stylus to sign the deed to your garden, you find the DS’s bottom screen divided into three parts: Garden, Episodes and Playground. Garden leads you to your first patch of uncleared land, and Playground gives you a chance to design a fully realized garden and populate it with all of the species and characters you have previously unlocked. Your first stop should be the Episodes, a series of tutorials that guides you through the basics of piñata gardening. Each Episode is hosted by a different character, who explains how to move piñatas around the garden, buy and plant seeds, build houses and use the Journal, which serves as a compendium of all your accumulated piñata knowledge. Each of the Episodes can be repeated as many times as you like, should you need a refresher course.

After completing the tutorials, you move on to your first garden. The bottom screen shows a view of a section of your land, with HUD icons placed in the upper corners. These icons are used to equip the tools you need to interact with the landscape. You start by using a shovel to turn over dirt patches and clear junk, then using a grass seed packet to make the area green and inviting. While this is going on, a clock on the upper right of the top screen shows the passage of day to night, with the scene on the bottom screen changing with it. As your skills progress, the petals surrounding the clock fill in with color. When all of the petals are shaded, you level up. Also, clearing unwanted items from your patch generates coins, which you can use to buy items such as seeds, plants and the services of the local home builder.

Once your new garden has been transformed from a pile of rocks and rubble into a piñata-friendly haven, the creatures start appearing. As they arrive, they are identified in the event window in the upper left corner of the top screen. Below this is a listing of the features of your garden, or the various requirements of any piñata you select. A quick trip to the Journal gives you details on each species you have attracted. Making piñatas happy means more species appear, starting the whole happiness process all over again. When your garden starts to become crowded, you have to decide which of your visitors has to be sold, making way for other species to thrive. When you reach certain levels, more ground is added to your garden, making room for more interesting items such as water features, which attract even more piñata species.

Sandbox games such as VPPP are perfect for the DS, especially for players like me who only use it to pass the time at the laundromat. Using godlike gardening powers to provide homes for cute but doomed targets of blindfolded, stick-wielding children certainly offers a pleasant way to pass the time before fluffing and folding, but is there enough variety to keep you interested after your laundry is done, or is VPPP the virtual version of a used dryer sheet? On to the numbers…