Each turn in Pick a Pen: Tuinen, the active player rolls the five colored pencils, then chooses one and marks spaces on their individual player sheet. Each other player in turn drafts a pencil and uses it. Pencils show symbols on their different sides, and the symbols on top of the chosen pencil determine what players do on their sheets.

Each sheet shows bordered gardens, and on a turn, you fill in the indicated number of spaces in that color; all of those spaces must be adjacent to one another, in addition to being adjacent to everything colored previously. Your goal is to fill gardens with only a single color or with five different colors, scoring bonus points as you do so. The game ends when a player has completely colored all of their gardens or failed to color in five times.

Pick a Pen: Tuinen includes three difficulty levels of player sheets, with flowers and trees on sheets 2 and 3 to help you earn bonus points in different ways.