Frosted Blooms Board Game Review
Anytime you give my wife and I a game about flowers, and a game with tiles, it’s generally a combination that really works. It’s a great melding of a theme we enjoy and a mechanism we love. Frosted Blooms not only looks great, but provides exactly what we are looking for in a game experience – something easy to teach and easy to play, perfect for getting game night going, or winding it down.
In Frosted Blooms, players are working to create connected tulips of the same colours, connected water spaces, and creating holds in their fields for windmills, barns and workers. As you play, you will be working towards objectives shared by all players, perhaps having a certain number of barns. There are a ton of objective tiles in the box, and you only play with so many each game, which keeps things fresh for each experience; it will also alter your strategy, which is great for this faster paced board game you are likely to play often.
Players will move the flower token around the outside of the board until they reach a tile they want to draft and place in their garden. The trick here is that for each tile you pass over, you need to leave a coin behind which can be claimed by other players. Once you’ve selected your tile, you’ll place it into your garden. After placing, you play one of your landscape cards from your hand and score based on that card. If you created any of the printed open spaces in your garden, you must fill them with the appropriate pieces: windmills, workers or barns. Play continues until 10 rounds have passed, after which final scores are tallied and a winner is determined.
What makes Frosted Blooms different from other tile laying games I’ve played recently is that you want to create those open spaces in your play area. So often we are taught to create tight groups of tiles, filling in every gap if possible, and bemoaning the moments where something isn’t just right. In Frosted Blooms, you WANT to do this stuff, especially if there are some high value objectives tied to the number of barns, windmills, or workers. Plus, each placed worker earns you a coin, which can help in tile selection as you play.
It is a really clever system, in my opinion, where you aren’t just worried about the points you’ll score from your card each round, but also making sure you get a variety of things for objectives too. Sometimes, you’ll have to prioritize one over another, and that decision experience is a lot of fun.
Accessibility is really important to me as I get older and expand my gaming group. Frosted Blooms can be taught in just a few minutes, but provides a really rich and deep experience that is incredibly fulfilling. Not only are you building a really cool garden in front of yourself, but you also get to make great decisions that will heavily influence the score you finish with. Quick turns makes this one of those rare experiences where all player coins are equally enjoyable. This game is great at 2-Players, and great at 4-Players. Add in a fabulous production, and you’ve got a game that should live on the shelves of amateur and hardcore board game players for years to come.
Article By Adam
