Flora Funga is a double-set of board games, perfect for two to four players and featuring a fun nature theme.
We’ve reviewed games before that have multiple methods of play, or even multiple games that can be played from the same box, however, Flora Funga does something very clever because these aren’t just ‘other parts’ in the box, everything has a purpose and fits the theme.
So, as this is two games, we’ll cover them in order.
Flora, as you might imagine, focuses on flowers. In this case, it’s specifically dandelions and their lifecycle, from plant to buds to flowers to seeds and then starting again. Each player is given a handful of mission cards from a deck and their job is to make sure that one of the plants resembles the mission so that they can complete this. Players take turns placing a number of pieces (defined by the turn) onto the grassy board, initially adding just one piece, but later having the option to add multiples. Pieces are stacked to emulate the growth of the flower, and swept clean when the plant can take no more completed flowers.
As any one plant can have up to four buds on them, simpler seeming missions might be easily blocked out by other players excitedly adding more buds on, which can frustrate, but as the plants reset once complete it actually allows you to instead play on other plants, strategically, as most people will betray their goals with quick grabs towards missions.
Funga is all about strategic placement, while also being a bit like a puzzle. The 51 mushroom pieces are placed in a central area and players take turns adding a new one to the board. Each player has mission cards which instruct them on patterns that must be made on the board for them to earn points – these can range from using specific mushrooms in specific ways, or to simply having a cluster of mushrooms around a point. Some of the mushroom tokens also have spiders on them, which tie into the point scoring element.
Both of Flora Funga’s games suffer from the same issues, which is that they’re a little bit fiddly at times. Funga requires pieces to be placed adjacently, but sometimes it doesn’t quite work and instead you end up sliding pieces along (which does feel a lot like cheating) while Flora’s stacking can sometimes result in things being knocked if you’re not very delicate. There’s always a risk for these things with games with small pieces, of course, and Flora Funga is worth this risk – both of the games are very fun.
The one thing that I think I would have liked, which I don’t think is ever possible and isn’t even an issue for Flora Funga to fix up, is that the two sets of pieces don’t interact with each other in any way. In instances like this, as rare as this is, a third game that brought the two together would be welcome, because – if it wasn’t for the fantastic theming – otherwise this feels like it could just be two microgames sold separately
Flora Funga is available now, you can find it on Amazon.
