We previously featured A Gentle Rain three years ago on Board's Eye View. That edition of Kevin Wilson's game was published by Mondo. Now A Gentle Rain is back - in a similar small-box package - but this edition is published by Incredible Dream Studios. There are some small cosmetic differences but the game is the same, as you can see from our back-to-back Board's Eye View 360. It's still a gentle, rather zen, solitaire game, and it's additionally playable as a fully co-operative game.
Open up the compact box and you'll find a stack of tiles with half a flower shape on each of its four edges. Game play couldn't be simpler: just take a tile from the face-down stack and place it so that the edges match up with the tiles already laid. If at any point you can't place a tile (possible a couple of turns or so in but unlikely after that) then you discard it. When you connect four tiles in a square, you create a circular space in the middle and into that space you drop one of the eight wooden blossom tokens, with the only proviso that the token has to match one of the four adjacent flowers. Your aim is to get all eight tokens placed out. If that's too gentle for you, you can keep score: take 8 points for the blossom tokens and another for each tile remaining in your stack when the eighth token is placed.
Maybe it's the simple elegance of Kevin Wilson's tile-laying, pattern-building design. Maybe it's the understated art from Weronika Kozyra, building on Chris Bilheimer's art from the previous edition. Either way, A Gentle Rain makes for a satisfying pastime. It doesn't demand intense concentration and play is relaxing rather than an adrenaline rush. It certainly makes for a very pleasant alternative to Patience.
If you're scoring, then there are strategies to develop. The four sides of each tile always show four different flowers so you'll want to avoid creating spaces where it's impossible to lay a tile. If, for example, you end up with two identical flower halves both edging the same space they you'll have created a a space where there's no possibility of fitting a tile... There are 'card-counting' style judgement calls to be made too over which flower token to place from the four eligible for each circle space you generate.
There's a lot of gameplay packed into this tiny box so it's good to see this satisfying little game being brought to a wider audience.
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