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Writer's pictureBoard's Eye View

Flower Fields

With its green box and FF title you'd be forgiven for thinking this must be a game designed by Friedemann Friese and published by 2F Spiele. You'd be mistaken, however. Flower Fields is a drafting and tile placement game designed by Luca Bellini and Luca Borsa, and published by Horrible Guild, tho' the art is from (FF) Fabio Frencl.



There's a solitaire option but essentially Flower Fields is a game for 2-4 players, each of whom is building a garden on their board. On your turn you will mostly be drafting a polyomino tile from those in the circular display: you can always take for free the tile immediately to the right of the Sun marker but you can take tiles further round the rondel by adding a bee from your supply to each tile you pass over. From our plays at Board's Eye View we found that players almost always took the free tile; on the rare occasion when a player paid a bee to take the next tile along, the bonus bee on the passed-over tile made that a super attractive choice for the next player.


When you draft a tile you must immediately place it on your board, initially anywhere on the bottom row and subsequently orthogonally connected to a previously laid tile. You're trying to create contiguous areas with the same flowers (colour) because you'll score at the end for the number of delineated 'zones' in each area. The white tiles don't have any spaces for bees but they score a single point for each zone. However, the coloured floral areas' scores are calculated by multiplying the 'zones' by the number of bees placed in the area: so no bees, no points...



When you draft a tile that has a bee space on it, you can, as part of the same turn, immediately place a bee on that space but if there are already bees in the same connected area, you must pay a bee for each of them. If you want to place a bee onto your board other than on the tile you just took, that'll take a turn (so it'll be instead of drafting a tile). There will be four two-square tiles available, distinct from the polyominoes in the rondel. These all contain a bee space and they can be invaluable in adding scoring potential to an otherwise bee-barren floral area but it will cost you two bees to take one. The pairs of bees paid here (and the two that start off in the centre) are also available to be taken on your turn in lieu of a drafted tile.


Scoring is only done at the end of the three-round game: each round ending when the last polyomino tile is taken from the rondel. However, at the end of rounds 1 and 2, players add to their supply of bees for every hive visible on the board minus one for each visible cobweb. The boards all start off with seven hives and five cobwebs so during the first two rounds you'll probably want wherever possible to cover cobwebs and avoid overlaying hives so that you maximise the number of bees gained at the start of rounds 2 and 3.


Flower Fields is easy to teach and learn, and it plays quickly: most of our games ran to around 30 minutes. Just be warned, the tiles are all single-sided, so this isn't a game where you can flip a tile to double its placement options. There's a strong element of puzzle optimisation in working out which tiles fit best on your board and where, as well as in making sure you have enough bees to ensure that the areas you create score well. And it can sometimes pay to use your turn to snap up the last available bees so as to deny other players the opportunity to maximise the scoring potential of their upcoming tile picks...


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