Keep a tree alive in Yamadori for a full year — 365 real days of watering, pruning, and patience — and a real bonsai ships to your door. Not a raffle ticket. Not a discount code. A living tree, raised on real benches at our partner nursery. This is the promise the whole game is built around, and today I want to explain exactly how it works.

Games have been handing out rewards for as long as games have existed: badges, skins, loot, little bursts of confetti. All of it is pixels. It disappears the moment you put the phone down, and the games know it — that's why they need streaks and timers to drag you back.

Every other game's reward is pixels. Ours is photosynthesis.

Yamadori is a bonsai nursery that lives in your pocket. Your trees grow on a real calendar — open the app tomorrow and yours is bigger. There is no way to buy time, no way to skip it, no way to fake it. Which means a tree that reaches its 365th day is proof of something no purchase can be: a year of showing up.

We decided that deserves more than confetti.

How the exchange works

One year, measured honestly. A tree becomes exchangeable on its 365th day of care in the game. That's the whole gate. Time is the one currency in Yamadori that can never be bought, so the exchange can't be bought either — only kept.

Guaranteed, never gambled. This is not a sweepstake. There are no drawings, no odds, no “winners.” Every tree that reaches its year qualifies, every time. If you did the year, you get the tree.

A real tree, from a real nursery. What arrives is a living juniper raised at our partner nursery — a real working bonsai nursery run by a close friend of mine — along with a care card and a guide to your first year with it. You spent a year learning the rhythm of watering, pruning, and patience on a digital tree. The real one is where that practice goes next.

Your digital tree stays. Nothing is traded away or burned. The tree you grew keeps growing in your nursery — it simply wears a permanent mark from that day on: rooted in the real world.

Why a year?

Because a year is the honest unit of bonsai. It's one full turn of the seasons: a spring flush, a summer of growth, an autumn hardening, a winter rest. Anyone can care for a tree for a weekend. A year is where a habit becomes a hobby, and a hobby becomes yours. If we mailed trees to everyone who downloaded the app, most of those trees would die on a windowsill by August. The year is how we know the tree is going to someone who has already proven they'll show up.

The fine print, honestly

We're finalizing the program details now — shipping regions, per-household limits, timing, and the legal language that keeps a promise like this durable. All of it publishes in full at launch, before anyone's first tree comes due. The shape of the promise won't change: grow it for a year, and it becomes real.

And because the math matters: Yamadori launches with the exchange from day one, and a tree needs 365 days to qualify — so the first real trees leave the nursery about a year after launch. The first players to plant will be the first to hold one.

— Chase