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game report: A Gentle Rain
Jun. 19th, 2024 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yhleeSorry I've been so absent; my life has been Exciting and I'm under deadline for two books.
My impulse game purchase from Little Wars today was A Gentle Rain: game by Kevin Wilson, art by W. Kozyra. It's a board game that fits in a box about the size of two poker decks stacked one on top of the other. I LOVE IT and plan on carrying it everywhere.
It is for one or more players, ages 8+ (down to six years old might be okay if they're not prone to EATING the tokens), plays in about 15 minutes, and it's super cozy and chillaxing - it's a sort of tile-matching game themed around a pond? meadow? blooming during a period of rain, and whenever you complete a set you can score one of the eight flower tiles. I should take pics to explain this better, but I'm abnormally bad at understanding rules and I figured out how to play in thirty seconds, and it's so incredibly pretty and relaxing as a solitaire experience. In this case the theme and the pretty flower art also help sell the whole thing; I really, really think this would not work without the art/theme component, which is interesting - the narrative is thin (it's marketed as a soothing/meditative experience), and most of the time when I think of strongly themed games, I think of narrative. But this is probably due to my comparatively thin sampling of board games vs. TTRPGs.
Edited: And here's a pic and a little more explanation of gameplay:
Basically, you draw and place one tile at a time; if you can place a tile, you must; otherwise you discard it. Each time you "complete" a set of four tiles to form an empty circle, you place your choice of flower tiles from the four options surrounding it - here I chose pale green, and that's the flower that "blooms." There's one of each color (eight) so it's possible to choose in such a way that you aren't able to place a tile because you used them up elsewhere - and of course there's also no guarantee that you'll be able to place all eight.
My impulse game purchase from Little Wars today was A Gentle Rain: game by Kevin Wilson, art by W. Kozyra. It's a board game that fits in a box about the size of two poker decks stacked one on top of the other. I LOVE IT and plan on carrying it everywhere.
It is for one or more players, ages 8+ (down to six years old might be okay if they're not prone to EATING the tokens), plays in about 15 minutes, and it's super cozy and chillaxing - it's a sort of tile-matching game themed around a pond? meadow? blooming during a period of rain, and whenever you complete a set you can score one of the eight flower tiles. I should take pics to explain this better, but I'm abnormally bad at understanding rules and I figured out how to play in thirty seconds, and it's so incredibly pretty and relaxing as a solitaire experience. In this case the theme and the pretty flower art also help sell the whole thing; I really, really think this would not work without the art/theme component, which is interesting - the narrative is thin (it's marketed as a soothing/meditative experience), and most of the time when I think of strongly themed games, I think of narrative. But this is probably due to my comparatively thin sampling of board games vs. TTRPGs.
Edited: And here's a pic and a little more explanation of gameplay:
Basically, you draw and place one tile at a time; if you can place a tile, you must; otherwise you discard it. Each time you "complete" a set of four tiles to form an empty circle, you place your choice of flower tiles from the four options surrounding it - here I chose pale green, and that's the flower that "blooms." There's one of each color (eight) so it's possible to choose in such a way that you aren't able to place a tile because you used them up elsewhere - and of course there's also no guarantee that you'll be able to place all eight.
