Frosted Blooms

• Designer: Bruno Cathala, Ludovic Maublanc
• Publisher: Synapses Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 25-40 mins
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4rPnrfm
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Welcome to Frosted Blooms – In the soft dawn of a Dutch spring, the last breath of winter lingers in the air, leaving a delicate frost upon the awakening fields. But beneath this shimmering chill, bold tulips begin to bloom vibrant, colorful, and full of promise.

You are one of the master gardeners, competing to create the most admired tulip garden of the season. Every choice you make, each landscape, windmill raised, and each thoughtfully arranged flowers will bring you closer to perfection.  Plan with care, cultivate with style, and let your tulip tapestry shine as the pride of the lowlands!

Players compete for the most harmonious and valuable tulip garden over the course of ten rounds. In each round, they select a landscape brick to add them to their own garden, and then play a card of their hand to score points according to the pattern groups received. The enclosed spaces house workers, barns or mills that offer important bonuses at the end of the game. In addition, players can confirm goals by grouping certain elements and filling their garden. Whoever ends with the highest score wins the game!

The main board is placed on the table and 5 random landscape tiles and the flower token are placed around it. (2N + 4) objective tiles are drawn at random and they are placed in the appropriate spots on the right side of the main board. Players take a starting tile, a deck of cards in their player color and some starting coins. Players shuffle their deck and draw a starting hand of 3 cards.

The game will be played over 10 rounds.  On each turn, you must choose a Flower token and then use it to expand your garden. You must also then play a card.  Optionally, you then place an improvement if you can and then you can also claim objectives if possible.  Now in more detail:

Choose a Flower Token – move the flower token clockwise around the board until you get to the tile you want. For each tile you skip over, place a coin from your supply next to the skipped tile.  Take the tile next to the flower token (and any coins next to it).  Note that if you have no coins, you must simply take the next clockwise tile.  Each landscape tile has 2 connected water spaces and then one each of purple, white and red flowers.  There will always be a total of 6 flowers on a tile.

Expand your Garden – your new tile must be edge to edge with at least one existing tile in correct alignment. You are allowed to also leave up to a 4 block space as a hole within your garden.  

Play a card – after expanding your garden, play a card from your hand face up and then score it using the tile you just placed and any tiles that form orthogonally adjacent groups with that tile.  Mark the score on the scoring chart and then draw a new card to bring your hand back to 3.

Place Improvements – if you can place one, you must. If you have made a hole in your garden (max 4 spaces), fill it in with the appropriate number/type of improvements – workers get you a coin now and 3VP at the end of the game, farmhouses score 10 VP at the end of the game, and windmills score 25VP at the end of the game.

Objectives – now see if you can claim any objectives – based on the number of flowers of a type in a single group OR the number of improvements total you have on your board.  Claimed objectives will score at the end of the game.

After ten rounds, all players will have played all their landscape cards – the game now moves into final scoring:

• Points scored during the game
• Improvements –  workers 3VP, farmhouses 10 VP, and windmills 25VP.
• Objective tiles – as shown on the tile
• Coins – 1 VP per coin left over

The player with the most points wins, ties going to the player with the most coins left over.

My thoughts on the game

Frosted Blooms combines a few different mechanisms to form a challenging puzzle of a game.  Each round you get a tile from the market, and then you have to find the best place for it.  You can play short term and put it in a place to maximize your scoring card this turn. You could also play longer term to make holes in your display in order to place improvements.  It’s a nice bonus when you’re able to do both.

The coin situation can get tight in the game as players do not start with many, so you’ll have to really decide when you want to spend coins to skip a tile in the market.  Likewise, if you have the opportunity to pick up a tile with a few coins on it, it might be worth it to do so over a more ideal piece – just to give yourself more flexibility in later rounds.  It can be especially hard to be the first player in turn order because you get only one coin to start the game, and I’m not sure the reduced flexibility is equal to the advantage you get for having first crack at the objective tiles, etc.

While the scoring cards in your hand are nice, and they should not be ignored, players will generally score more from the objective tiles and the improvements.  For instance, I think that the 25VP for a windmill is as much as any objective tile.  As you still have to play a scoring card on each turn, you can really look at the objective points as true extras.  You’re even incentivized to make single space holes because that is the only way to add new coins to the game.

The game moves quickly with only ten rounds in the game – though some of the turns can take a bit as players have to figure out which tile they want to take and then where they want to place it and then which scoring card they want to play.  You’ll want to try to keep an eye on what other players are doing because you’re in competition with them for the objective tiles.  It’s not so easy to do this however as the flowers are not big and it’s hard to really pick them out across a larger table.  

Frosted Blooms is a nice quick tile laying game which gives you multiple things to consider on each turn.  It’s quite a challenge to do well at both the short term and long term objectives especially with the limited number of turns in the game.

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor

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