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Writer's pictureBoard's Eye View

Bower

Themed around species of birds that are known for collecting flashy adornments to their nest, Cranio Creations' Bower is a two-player, tile drafting game using domino-like tiles where each of the two ends shows an item (usually one or a pair of feathers or flowers) and one of three background materials (straw, gravel or moss). The game is designed by Pierpaolo Paoletti with art by Irene Laschi.



Set up involves each player taking three of the eight face-down wooden pieces and positioning them in the rack between the players so that only they can see the flower or feather on the piece, and which colour it is. The pieces will each correspond to one of the six columns in the 6 x 4 grid both players will be building with their tiles. At the end of the game, when players have drafted and placed out 12 tiles to complete their grid, the wooden pieces are revealed and the player with the most of whatever is indicated in that column will gain an egg (ie: score a point). The players with the largest orthogonally contiguous areas of straw, gravel and moss will also score eggs.


Since you each only know three of the six column requirements, this is at least as much a deduction as puzzle optimisation game. Your opponent seems to be deliberately placing red feathers in a specific column so you may deduce that that's the requirement for that column. Of course, your opponent might be trying to deceive you, especially as there's a bonus egg on offer if you manage to win a column's majority with just a single item... There's certainly scope for feints and bluffing, tho' in our plays at Board's Eye View we've generally found it was better to focus more directly on winning the columns we know and competing for the area majorities rather than trying to outguess our opponent.



There are a couple of other elements to the game. If a tile includes a shell, that acts as a tie-breaker in determining the column majority. If you place out tiles with three gems in the same column or in the same continguous terrain, you get to select a special tile that will give you an additional ability. These vary quite widely. There are special tiles that reduce your opponent's hand size (you ordinarily have a hand size of two but the reduced hand size means you're forced to immediately play the tile you draft) and there are special tiles which give you a potential additional egg-scoring opportunity. However, you can be unlucky and draw tiles that don't give you much of practical benefit - especially if you are drawing your special tile towards the end of the game. Tho' Bower otherwise plays very smoothly, the iconography on some of the special tiles is relatively opaque: we found ourselves having always to check the rulebook to work out what each of the special tiles did.


Bower plays comfortably in around 20 minutes and, notwithstanding our caveat over the special tiles, it's a head-to-head puzzler we've enjoyed so we're pleased to have added it to our nest of games.


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