The Simplicity of Floriferous

There are a ton of board games available right now that promise a fairly relaxing experience. I find most of these claims to be incredibly false as every board game has that sense of urgency, or at the very least, somewhat of a desire to win. And that, ultimately, drives stress levels through the roof. When I read a similar claim on the box of Floriferous, I was pretty skeptical. After playing a few games, I’m not anymore.

Cards are laid out in Floriferous in a grid depending on the number of players. Most of the cards are standard garden cards – flowers, arrangements, sculptures – while the bottom row is all Desire Cards, or more understandably, end-game scoring cards. Each round, players move their pawn one column over and choose a card from that column, replacing the card location with their pawn. This continues column by column until players have visited all of the 5 columns. Then the grid is reset and players do this process 2 more times.

Most of the cards in the game are flower cards, coming in a variety of different kinds and in different colors. What you choose depends on the end-game points you are trying to achieve. The thing is, each column only has a few options to choose from, so I never found choosing that stressful.

There is a bit of luck in the way you attempt to play the game. IN my first game, for example, I picked up nearly a 10-pack of daisy cards, hoping to get the “2 Points per Daisy” Desire Card. Unfortunately, that card never came up, so my large collection of Daisy’s was pretty useless. In those moments, things can feel just a bit unfortunate, but the decision to collect the Daisy’s without having end-game scoring cards was my decision, so is it really “luck?”

The thing is, Floriferous plays in 20 minutes or less, so it’s easy to play a number of games in one sitting. And with many short games, even if you do really poorly, the experience is over fast enough that you won’t dwell on it for long, and if you enjoyed the experience or think you have a good strategy to use next time, you can just set up the game again and go!

Lately, my wife and I have been suckers for small and quick card games, and Floriferous definitely fits the bill. This is a game that will last in our collection for quite a long time!