Gloomies challenges you to strategically grow and harvest flowers

Gloomies love flowers, they love wearing them and collecting them. Your job is to oversee both the growing and harvesting of the flowers in this two phase, contract-based board game.

Before I start, I should state that Gloomies is an incredibly easy game to understand once you’ve got to grips with it. In fact, it’s actually two incredibly easy games glued together. The issue comes in the instructions manual which manages to squeeze an amazing number of images into it, however it spans an ominous, eleven pages. That’s far too long for a game that also insists upon being described as ‘grow and then harvest flowers’. It also splits some instructions across four or five pages, and doesn’t detail a major victory points scoring method of the game.

Once you get over the instructions though, Gloomies is a really fun game with a very simple, easy to understand structure.

For set up, you’ll shuffle and place out the flower deck and order deck, then placing three cards from each pile up next to it. You then place the flower tokens into the token tray, and put the lower board (with 6×8 lanes of flowers) under the second board (with peek holes). You then shuffle the bonus tokens and put them in the purple row of spaces, stacked three high, and hand a player guide to each player. After that you take flower cards and little helpers depending on the number of players, and you’re good to start.

Phase one is about growing flowers, but, critically, you’re growing those flowers to collect bonuses, because those bonuses — despite what the instructions might infer — are gamechangers. In addition to that, when you grow flowers you add them to your player guide, and they then form your deck for the second round… in fact, all cards in both your scoring area and your hand become your deck for the second phase.

So, for Phase one you’ll use flowers from your hand to try and fill out a row. You can only proceed along the row if you have the right flowers (or jokers) in your hand, you’ll then grab a bonus token from the row you finish in. These bonus tokens either give victory points, little helpers or allow you to take orders. Critically, the token isn’t kept by the player, but flipped down to the lower side of the board. Of the awards on offer: Little helpers can be used in a variety of ways, from using them to play an extra flower card to helping you draw more cards. Orders are the best way to win the game, giving a bunch of extra points if you can every flower required on them in phase two. Finally, you’ll draw two cards, or one joker, although you can spend little helpers to draw more at this point.

Once players have met or passed the white line in every row, phase one ends and points are scored based on the number collected, stardust tiles collected and some other variables. This encourages you to actually NOT lay out the max cards and to instead try and get as many bonus tokens as possible. The unused flower and order cards are put back into the box, players create a personal deck made from the cards they’ve scored and the cards they’ve drawn.

Phase two is simply the reverse of the first phase, but you draw from your own pile and collect backwards across the board. The reverse of the bonus tokens no longer include orders (as they were removed from play) with some of them instead usable as flowers when it comes to final scoring. Final scoring, rewards the flowers you’ve used to decorate your player guide and any order cards you have.

Once you’ve played Gloomies once, successfully, you’ll probably never need to look at the manual again and as such you’ll find it an incredibly easy to pick up and play game. It’s full of beautiful artwork and the combination of astral and floral works incredibly well with the colour-palette; That makes for a family-friendly, tactile game that — ultimately — encourages you to slow down and take your time.

You can grab a copy of Gloomies from Zatu Games.