Flower Fields – It’s Looking Rosy

Create YOUR garden in Flower Fields, a tile-laying game for 2-4 players by Luca Bellini and Luca Borsa, published by Horrible Guild.

Gameplay

Start by passing out player boards. Everyone needs to put their board in the same orientation. There are 1-4 dots on the edge of each player board. Choose a number and the corresponding side of the board should then be “down” for every player.

Each player also gets five bee meeples.

Put four small tiles on each of the marked spaces of the central field and two bees in the middle. Surround the central field tile with a circle of larger tiles pulled randomly from the bag. The tile count depends on the player count. Place the sun token somewhere along the circle of larger tiles.

Whoever most recently smelled a flower goes first.

On your turn, you may take a large flower tile, take a small flower tile, take bees, or place a bee.

Large Flower Tiles

Take the next tile in clockwise order from the sun token in the circle of tiles and place it on your board. The first tile *must* touch the bottom of the board and every subsequent tile *must* touch an existing tile. If you don’t like the next tile, you can move the sun ahead to take another tile by placing a beeple on every tile you skip.

All tiles have some number of zones on them which will count for points at the end of the game. White tiles may have beehive icons on them and colored tiles may have bee icons on them.

Once you’ve placed your tile, if it has a bee icon you may immediately take the “place a bee” action on that tile, but there may be an associated cost to doing so.

Small Flower Tiles

Instead of taking a large tile, you may pay two bees to take one of the the smaller, easier-to-place tiles from the central field. Once again, you may put a beeple on this tile, but there may be an associated cost. These smaller tiles only ever come in red, yellow, or blue.

Take Bees

If none of the tiles are working for you, you can take two beeples from the central field, if any are available.

Place a Bee

Put a beeple on a bee icon in your field. The cost to place a beeple is the number of bees already in that area (an area is a contiguous set of zones of a single color). So, in this example, there are already three beeples in this red area. To place a beeple onto the empty icon, you must pay three beeples to the bank as well.

Season End

The season immediately ends after a player takes the last large tile from the circle around the field. Each player calculates their “bee income” – the number of beehives on their garden board minus the number of spiderwebs. Each player gets beeples according to this income.

Then discard any remaining small tiles. Refill the garden board with four new small tiles, and make a new ring of randomly-selected large tiles. You’re ready to start the next season!

Game End and Scoring

The game ends after the third season. Don’t bother calculating bee income or refilling the tiles.

Players score their best area in each color (red, yellow, and blue) – the number of zones in that area times the number of bees in that area.

Then score the largest white area – one point for each zone.

Finally, score five points for each complete row and complete column on the garden board: that means filled with colored spaces, whether from tiles or pre-printed on the board.

Whoever has the most points is the top gardener – this time.

Solo Mode

Flower Fields includes rules to play the game solo. Shake up three double-sided “AI tokens” and add their values to determine the actions of an automa player, who will remove large or small pieces from the central circle. The automa places bees on large pieces it skips.

In solo play, your goal is to get the highest score you can and compare to the scoring chart in the rules; but it feels much like the regular game, and is a great way to try out different strategies.

Impressions

For the experienced gamer, Flower Fields reads as a combination of Patchwork and Kingdomino. The introduction of bees as a currency obviously ratchet the complexity up a little bit above either of these games, but it isn’t so complex as to render the game unapproachable for kids.

We did find the terminology in this game a little difficult to start out, as the terms “area” and “zone” are a little indistinct. It’s also easy to forget that you are allowed to cover the zones pre-printed on the board. However, those zones do count for column, row, AND area scoring.

It seems obvious that you’ll want to make decent sized areas in each color – but we found that focusing on white can be a winning strategy as well. Tiles with white zones tend to be bigger, and are more likely to have hives, which will get you more beeples for later in the game. Neglecting to boost your beeple income can be disastrous as your areas grow.

Flower Fields isn’t a huge box, but it doesn’t function particularly well as a travel game. You need too much open area to set up the central tableau. Plus, if you’re not in a contained area you’re bound to lose a tiny beeple or two.

It took a game or two to get our heads around all of the different mechanics and scoring strategies in Flower Fields but once we did it tasted sweeter than honey. Don’t let these little issues affect your run through the wildflowers though, because Flower Fields comes up smelling like roses.

You can get your own copy of Flower Fields directly from Horrible Guild, on Amazon, or at your friendly local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Flower Fields from Horrible Guild (via Flat River Group) for this review.

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