SNAP Review – Floristry

Who knew the floral market was so competitive? Auctioning flowers at the beginning of the day, grabbing the flowers you want and. leaving the rest behind for the losers of the bids. Then you’re fighting to make the biggest and best arrangements of whatever flowers you think are the best for you. I had no idea it was quite that cutthroat.

I don’t think it’s quite like that in real life, but you’ve given a pretty quick tease to what you’ll be doing in Floristry.

This is a SNAP review for Floristry.

Game

Floristry is a quick two-player game by David Gordon and TAM. It’s best for ages 10 and up, and it’s the first game published by UP Games.

The box says it takes 20 minutes to play, but we found that with experience, it goes even faster than that.

Art

Let’s talk about the art in Floristry.

The main thing you’ll be looking at in Floristry are these flower tiles. Each one pictures two blooms. There are six kinds of flowers and they’re all nicely distinct from each other. The tiles are also double-sided, which means you never have to worry about turning them right-side up when you pull them out of the bag.

Speaking of which, the bag is a nice woven material and it’s just the right size – neither too small for your hand, nor so big that you have to rummage for pieces.

There’s also cute cat meeples! This is Parfait, and this is Tapioca. They’re only used for tracking your score at the end of the game, but I love them.

What else is there?

There’s the storefront frames – these are simple open squares with a scoreboard around the outside and a little colored awning border at the top. Again, they’re double-sided, which minimizes the work in setting the game up.

Finally, there’s also a “web app”. We normally don’t talk about these in the “art” section, but it’s pretty intuitively designed, giving you all the information you need to know in a clean and uncrowded way.

Mechanics

OK, so there’s tiles and cats and a web app… what are we doing here? Let’s talk about the mechanics of Floristry.

Start the game by setting out the easel and the bag of flower tokens. Each player takes a storefront frame and a cat, and one player brings up the Floristry app on their phone, where both players can reach it. Then each player draws a single tile from the bag and puts it somewhere in the middle of their frame.

The game plays over ten rounds, and each round has three simple steps.

First, a player draws four tiles from the bag and places them next to the phone to create the Market for the round.

Then both players press “ready” on the phone app, and the countdown begins! You have a maximum of 15 seconds to decide just how much you’re willing to pay for the current market: the price starts at 5 and goes down about every three seconds.

If you tap your “purchase” button first, you win the auction for the round. The app automatically deducts the purchase price from your funds, and you select three out of the four tiles in the Market. The player who did not bid, gets the leftover tile for free.

If no one tapped the purchase button and the timer ran out, discard those tiles back to the box and start the next round.

The final stage of each round is deciding where to put your new tiles. Each tile must touch the edge of at least one other tile already in the frame, and you can’t go outside the frame… but you can slide it around on the table to try to accommodate your current flower arrangement better!

After ten rounds, the bag will be empty, and it’s time to score. The app will walk you through the six flower types, so nothing gets missed.

For each flower type, you gain points according to your largest connected group of that flower. You’ll need at least THREE flowers in a group to get a point, but if you have 12 or more, you’ll get TEN points!

After all six flower types have been scored, the app will also calculate the difference between the two players’ leftover money. The player with more money will gain points in the same way they did with the flowers.

And that’s it! The player with the most points wins.

Expectations

What did we expect from Floristry?

From the very first time I saw a prototype of this game, I liked it. I got to watch two players battle it out before I tried it myself, and I found it really intuitive – although not easy. I hoped it would be just as easy to teach and fun to play when we got a chance to try it at home.

You had seen it before me, and I knew you were super excited about this. Flowers, for me, in a theme are not really drawing me in much. But a good game is a good game and I do trust your judgement. With our weekly date-breakfasts, I knew this is a game that would hit the table a lot.

Surprises

And what surprised you about the game?

We talked about this on a recent episode of the podcast, but I think the thing that surprised me the most is that Floristry feels like, what I called, “the ALDI of board games”. And I say this in a good way! They’ve gotten rid of all the fluff and at the core delivered an excellent user experience.

Everything in this game is designed to reinforce the gameplay loop, which is fantastic. The web app is really just a web page, you can use it on any device that supports touch. The rules are just one sheet front and back, there’s no extra fluff to set the stage for a story or anything like that. In a two-player game, nobody really cares about that anyway. The graphic design is fantastic in ways that are obvious – and not. It’s just excellent execution soup to nuts. Or, flowers.

The game gives you room where you should have it, too! You mentioned sliding the frame around while keeping your tiles oriented, and you’re never going to fill the frame, because you’re always going back and forth winning these tiles. Everything is great and there’s no extra in this. And I love it.

As much as I liked this game when I saw it, I didn’t think it was a game we were going to play over and over again. But there are so many little touches that just WORK here – like the double-sided tiles and the fact that you see ALL the flower tiles every game! I can’t ever blame the randomness of the bag for not letting me see the tiles I really wanted. I know that I WILL see them, and it comes down to whether or not I’m willing to jump on that “purchase” button to get them.

One last thing that surprised me! Even though there’s a timer in this game, it works perfectly well for a casual setting with conversation. This is because the timer is only in 15 second increments, with down time in between, while players place their tiles and set up for the next round. And since we’re both working simultaneously in every round, we can stop for conversation, or an interruption, and we don’t have to worry about whose turn it is when we get back to playing.

Recommended!

We definitely recommend Floristry.

You can play Floristry with two adults, with an adult and a kid, even two kids can play this. It flexes super well. It’s short. Honestly, the biggest problem is: you’re going to want to come back to it again and again and eventually you might run out of time. This is a filler game that can fill an evening.

We give it 5 blooms out of 5.

And that’s Floristry, in a SNAP!

Get Floristry from UP Games, find it on Amazon, or ask for it at your local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Floristry from Up Games for this review.

This post contains affiliate links, which do not change your price, but help support The Family Gamers.

SNAP review music is Avalanche, provided courtesy of You Bred Raptors?