Flower Fields is an excellent addition to the board game collection of any tile-placing bee-loving flower fanatic! It’s all about trying to manage your efforts to make sure you get high points from the scoring, as it involves multiplying tile areas with bee tokens on those tiles – so you don’t want to fall behind on either of those fronts. I would say it feels a bit like a cousin to Patchwork by Lookout Games, so if you liked that and want a greater challenge or to share the fun with more than just one other person, this will be the game for you!
I see trees of green. Red and yellow and blue flowers too – Components and Artwork
Every single little piece of Flower Fields is aesthetically pleasing – from the little wooden bee tokens, to the jute bag for the tiles, and even to the sides of the box. It’s got a lovely floral design with thick outlines and colours that pop and just looks very satisfying once your board starts to fill up. It also means that the icons really stand out so you don’t forget about them, like the hives and cobwebs on your board.
The pieces themselves are well made and pop out from the board frame they come in very smoothly. I particularly like the wooden bee tokens (not least because they are nice to fidget with!) and the jute bag for the tiles, which matches the garden vibe very nicely.
Flower Fields is an excellent addition to the board game collection of any tile-placing bee-loving flower fanatic! It’s all about trying to manage your efforts to make sure you get high points from the scoring, as it involves multiplying tile areas with bee tokens on those tiles – so you don’t want to fall behind on either of those fronts. I would say it feels a bit like a cousin to Patchwork by Lookout Games, so if you liked that and want a greater challenge or to share the fun with more than just one other person, this will be the game for you!
I see trees of green. Red and yellow and blue flowers too – Components and Artwork
Every single little piece of Flower Fields is aesthetically pleasing – from the little wooden bee tokens, to the jute bag for the tiles, and even to the sides of the box. It’s got a lovely floral design with thick outlines and colours that pop and just looks very satisfying once your board starts to fill up. It also means that the icons really stand out so you don’t forget about them, like the hives and cobwebs on your board.
The pieces themselves are well made and pop out from the board frame they come in very smoothly. I particularly like the wooden bee tokens (not least because they are nice to fidget with!) and the jute bag for the tiles, which matches the garden vibe very nicely.
My only criticism of the art in Flower Fields is on the accessibility front, as you might expect with a game where the different colours are key to the gameplay. While the red, blue and yellow flower areas do have differently shaped flowers on them, they aren’t perhaps as distinct as they could be. It’s not unreasonable to think that a colour-blind player could get confused between them. It would maybe just benefit from a small unique icon in the corners of the different areas.
Everything is abuzz – Gameplay
As with a real garden, there are many ways you could tackle the challenges presented to you in Flower Fields, and it’s a fine balance of managing the resources and space on your board. You can take bee tokens (which act as a kind of currency), pick up and place a tile (potentially also placing a bee token on it), or place a bee token on an empty spot on your board. There is great variety in the actions you can take, it’s just enough to not get overwhelmed by choice but enough to feel like you can really weigh up your options and strategise.
The placing mechanics are also a healthy challenge. In Flower Fields, you are restricted to placing tiles connected to each other, but the real thinker is navigating what is already on the board – that being hives to gain more bee tokens, cobwebs that reduce how many bee tokens you can take, as well as a few pre-existing coloured areas. Will you cover up a hive to make the most of a good tile you’ve just picked up? Will you be able to complete more rows with what’s left if you place something in this particular spot? Can you find a way to link up two pre-existing coloured areas? Not to mention what tiles you may be leaving behind for your opponent(s)! There are just so many ways you could try to fill gaps or make things work, which I find to be such great fun.
One gameplay point that can sometimes feel a little punishing is having to discard bee tokens in order to place more bees on a coloured area. If you are placing a bee token on a coloured area where there already is one or more bee tokens, you must discard a number of bee tokens matching the number of them that are already there (for example, you’re placing a third token on that area, so you place one bee and discard two bees). These not only make a dent in your pile of bee tokens surprisingly quickly, but it is a rule that is actually quite easy to accidentally miss (having witnessed this multiple times from other players, and myself on odd occasion), meaning that there can be a stark difference in how well different players are doing depending on how well they remember to abide by this rule. It may just be purely by design, but I find it to be just slightly too difficult to manage for a cosy game like Flower Fields.
However, on the whole, the gameplay is really engaging and varied, and the difficulty level is almost perfect for a cosy yet competitive game.
Digging up some points – Scoring and Balance
I personally am a big fan of games that leave the scoring in categories to be counted up at the end, rather than adding up as you go. It means you can’t quite tell how the scores are going to shape up just by looking at everyone’s boards. And Flower Fields does just that! Its multiplication of the flower zones by the bee tokens on it can make for some surprising scores. There’s also good variety added by having points for white areas and filled rows and columns to boost your score.
As far as balance goes, while there’s some small element of luck in seeing what tiles are pulled from the bag for each round, this doesn’t cause too much imbalance in scores, as the players still have good options to prepare for future rounds or adapt with what they already have. That being said, if you play very well and get very lucky, the score can get exponential, but that requires both luck and strategy to nail, so still feels fair. I say this through slightly gritted teeth, as this is something I have not quite got the hang of, so I regularly get thrashed at Flower Fields!
Should you give this game a try?
The short answer is “absolutely you should”! The slightly longer answer is that Flower Fields is likely to complement any other games you have in your collection. While moderately difficult to learn at first (and the rules could perhaps be explained a little more smoothly), it works well as part of a board game night with friends or family, a reasonably timed game to play on its own with a partner, or maybe even as a solo enthusiast (though this review does not speak to the solo play experience). If you’re a fan of bees, flowers, strategy and puzzles, I definitely recommend giving it a try to see how it clicks with you. After all, you should always make time to stop and smell the flowers.
