The mysterious creatures known as Gloomies want to be adorned with beautiful cosmic flowers, and in Gloomies, that task falls to you. By planting and harvesting flowers, completing orders, and carefully managing your resources, you’ll help decorate these already majestic beings while competing to score the most points.
Gloomies is a 2–4 player game that plays in around 45–60 minutes. It’s split into two distinct phases, the Planting Phase and the Harvesting Phase. While both phases use similar core ideas, playing flower cards to interact with the central board, they feel different enough to keep the game fresh and engaging from start to finish.
Setup
The setup for Gloomies is simple and effective, and it does a great job of easing players into the experience.
Each player takes a player board and places it in front of them with the purple side face up. Shuffle the small flower cards and the larger order cards separately, placing both decks face down in the centre of the table. Reveal the top three cards of each deck to form a shared, face-up market.
Place the stardust tokens, helper tokens, and scoring tokens in piles within reach of all players, along with the tray containing the wooden flower tokens.
To build the game board, choose an orientation for the flower board and place it into the top of the box. Then place the perforated board with holes on top of it, creating the layered board used for the entire game. Shuffle the bonus tokens and place them in stacks of three, purple side face up, along the left side of the board.
Finally, choose a starting player. That player receives 4 flower cards and 1 helper. The second player takes 4 flower cards and 2 helpers, the third player 5 cards and 1 helper, and the fourth player 5 cards and 2 helpers.
Once that’s done, you’re ready to begin the Planting Phase.
The Planting Phase
The first half of Gloomies is the Planting Phase, sometimes called the Growing Stage. This is where the flower board gradually fills up, and where a lot of your longer-term planning quietly takes place.
On your turn, you may play up to three flower cards from your hand. Each card allows you to place a matching wooden flower token into the board. Flowers must be planted in rows, and they must always be placed in the leftmost available space of that row. You can’t skip spaces or jump ahead, once a row has started, it fills from left to right.
You’re never required to play the maximum number of cards. Choosing to plant fewer flowers can often be the better move, especially if you’re aiming for a specific bonus or trying to manage your hand more carefully for later.
Column Bonuses
After placing flowers, you check the column where your final flower was planted. At the top of each column is a bonus, and you immediately gain whatever reward is available there. These bonuses can include stardust, little helpers, or order cards, and they play a major role in shaping your strategy.
This is where Gloomies really starts to shine. Decisions aren’t just about placing flowers, but about positioning yourself to collect the bonuses that best support your plans.
Refilling Your Hand
Once bonuses are resolved, you refill your hand by drafting one or two flower cards from the face-up market. These cards don’t just matter now, they’ll become your personal deck during the Harvesting Phase, so what you take here can have lasting consequences.
End of the Planting Phase
The Planting Phase continues until the board is filled with flowers up to the designated white line. Once that happens, the phase immediately ends and players score.
Players gain points for the flower cards they’ve played, with bonus points awarded for collecting four or more cards of the same flower type. This early scoring can make a big difference, particularly if you’ve invested in rarer, higher-value flowers.
With the board now full, it’s time for the game to shift gears.
The Harvesting Phase
For the Harvesting Phase, players flip their player boards over to the turquoise side. All of the flower cards you collected during the Planting Phase are shuffled together to form your personal deck for the remainder of the game.
The core flow of the phase will feel familiar, but instead of adding flowers to the board, you’ll now be removing them.
On your turn, you once again play flower cards, this time to harvest matching wooden flowers from the board. Harvesting follows similar placement rules to planting, you remove flowers in rows and cannot skip spaces.
Harvesting Bonuses
After removing flowers, you check the column where your final flower was harvested and collect the bonus shown on the turquoise side of the board. These bonuses are different from those in the first phase and are often more directly tied to scoring and efficiency.
Storing Flowers and Completing Orders
Any flowers you harvest must be stored. You can place them onto order cards you’ve collected to fulfil them for higher points, or onto your player board for smaller, but reliable, scoring. Deciding where to allocate harvested flowers is one of the most important decisions in the second half of the game.
End of the Harvesting Phase
The Harvesting Phase ends once the board has been cleared back down to the white line. At that point, the game immediately moves to final scoring.
End of Game Scoring
At the end of the game, players total their victory points from several sources:
- Points scored during the Planting Phase
- Completed order cards
- Stardust collected across both phases
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Remaining, unused flowers
The player with the highest total score is declared the winner.
Final Thoughts
Gloomies is a wonderfully cosy game that’s easy to learn, quick to teach, and consistently satisfying to play. The two-phase structure means you never need to understand everything up front, playing the first phase well naturally sets you up for success in the second.
There’s a great balance between strategy and accessibility here. You can’t completely ruin another player’s game, but it’s very easy to fall behind if you’re not paying attention. Timing, pacing, and knowing when to push forward or hold back all matter, and the slightly player-controlled length of each phase adds an extra layer of tension.
The theme does a lot of heavy lifting too. Planting, harvesting, fulfilling orders, and physically slotting wooden flowers into the board all feel intuitive and satisfying. It’s a game that works just as well with families and newer players as it does with more experienced groups, and it rarely overstays its welcome.
Gloomies is a super cosy game of planting and harvesting flowers to adorn cute alien creatures, easy to learn, easy to play, and easy to love.
