Flower Fields

• Designer: Luca Bellini, Luca Borsa
• Publisher: Horrible Guild
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 8+
• Time:  30-40 min
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3AeOs77 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Colors, fragrance, complex corollas. There are many criteria for evaluating flowers, but there is only one visitor who can impartially decree the beauty of a garden: bees! Get ready to create the most beautiful garden in town! Get the best Flower tiles to plant large flower beds of the same color, and attract bees to increase their value! To emerge victorious, you must fashion a stunning, meticulously arranged garden bursting with life, vibrant colors…and the delightful buzz of bees

 Flower Fields is a competitive tile-placement game, where your goal is to create an attractive flower garden. The game is played over 3 Seasons, each composed of a variable number of rounds. Each player has their own garden board, and all are oriented the same way in regards to their owner (you can use the bees on the sides to make sure they are all in the same direction).  The field board is placed in the center of the table, with its small spaces filled with small tiles and 2 bees in the center.  Around this board, you’ll place 12 or 16 flower tiles for 3 or 4 players.  The sun token is randomly placed in this circle somewhere.

On your turn, you must perform 1 action, either taking Flower tiles from the Field and placing them in your garden, taking Bees from the Field, or placing Bees in your Garden.

When taking Flower tiles, you should pick the next tile after the Sun marker in the circle around the Field, but you can spend Bees from your reserve and place it on that tile to “skip” it and move the Sun token further. Manage your Bees wisely and pick the best Flower tiles.  You then place your chosen tile on your board.  If your tile has a Bee icon on it, you can also place a Bee on that tile as you place it.

Flower tiles must connect to at least another tile in your garden (and the first tile must touch the bottom edge of your board).  You can cover preprinted colored spaces on your board, but you cannot place on top of another tile. 

If you choose to place a Bee on your turn, you can place a Bee on any empty Bee space on a tile, but it will cost you a number of bees equal to the number of Bees already in that area. 

A Season ends when the last Flower tile has been taken from the circle around the Field. At the end of the first two rounds, there is a Garden Income phase where players gain Bees equal to (# of hives visible on your board or tiles MINUS # of spiderwebs visible).  At the end of the third Season, the game ends.

In the final scoring, you score your most valuable area of each color: Red/Yellow/Blue areas are worth points equal to the number of spaces times the number of Bees in that area; white areas are worth 1 point for each space in that area. You also get 5 points for each full row and/or column in your Garden board.

The player with the most points wins, ties broken in favor of the player with the most bees leftover.

My thoughts on the game

Flower Fields combines two ideas that I like a lot in other games – circular drafting and tile laying.  You are challenged here to get the best set of tiles you can, but you also have to concentrate on placing bees in the right places in order to get those tiles to score. 

And, of course, the whole idea of the game is about scoring.  This means you have to get tiles with bee spaces on them.  Of course, bees can get expensive, so you have to put them in the right places when you can afford them.  It should be noted that there aren’t that many tiles with bees, so you should put a premium on picking them up when you can.  It’s also not a bad idea to try to keep your bee economy moving forward, whether it’s picking bees up from the central board or maximizing your hive to web ratio to get a nice income between rounds.

The rules are fairly well written, and I’ll admit that our first game was marred by a bad rules reading (completely my fault here) – and we got the bee placement costs wrong.  Unsurprisingly, this made the game feel broken.  However, I figured out my shortcomings on a re-read of the rules, and we have since played it a few more times.

The game really has a nice tightness in trying to decide when and where to play a bee.  You do get to save an action if you place a bee as you place the tile, but sometimes you don’t have the bees to do it at the same time OR sometimes you just aren’t sure if you want to play a bee on that particular tile.  Additionally, sometimes leaving yourself a valid bee placement option is a nice way to temporize when the tile selection isn’t optimal for you.

The game looks great on the table with each player making their own colorful tableau.  The puzzle of figuring out which tile to get and where to place it gives you difficult choices at times, and the fact that you only score the largest group of each color forces you to leave space for the four competing areas.  In the end, usually the area with the most bees is the one you should focus on, and I’ve found that more often than not, I do better in the game with a single color that I’ve focused on and then hoping the three other ignored colors somehow make up the difference.  There was a bit of buzz around this at Spiel, and after a few games with the right rules, my interest in this game has bloomed.

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3AeOs77 

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it.  Dale Y
• Neutral. Mark Jackson, John P
• Not for me…