Flow
- Board's Eye View
- 21 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Flow, from Brain Games, is based on the movie which won the 2025 Oscar for Best Animated Feature that's about animals trying to survive an apocalyptic flood. However, you don't need to be familiar with the movie to play the game.
Appropriately then, this is a cooperative game for 1-6 players where you are drawing and placing tiles. To add tension, however, it's a game that's played in real-time, against a one-minute timer (not supplied: the expectation is players can use a timer on their phones).
There's an animal (character from the movie) in each of the four corners of the board and you have to lay tiles so that they create paths connecting each of them to the boat in the centre of the board. Tiles can be placed orthogonally adjacent to an animal or to a tile already on the board but paths have to be connected. Some tiles have obstructions on them. You still have to place those tiles even tho' they close off a route to the boat. In place of drawing a tile, however, you can play a card which gives you a single-use action, and there are cards that let you remove a tile from the board - so you can use such a card to get rid of one of those pesky obstructions. You win when all four critters have a path connecting them to the boat.
Easy, huh? Too easy, until you remember that one-minute timer! At the end of every minute, you stop play and roll two standard six-sided dice. These represent the flood waves and they remove all tiles from the numbered rows corresponding to the grid reference numbers rolled on the dice. You can be almost at the point of victory only to find the waves wiping away tiles and setting you back. It means the game can be a challenge because you lose if you don't complete the four connected pathways before you run out of tiles.
Brain Games have included scenario cards in the box that you can optionally add to vary the game play once you've managed to work up the rhythm to beat the game using the standard rules.
The one-minute timer makes Flow an exciting if sometimes frustrating game for children and it can certainly elevate the stress levels for adult players. Nevertheless, Flow is very suitable as a family game, especially so if you're a fan of the award-winning movie.
Flow and other Brain Games titles are now distributed in the UK by Hachette Boardgames UK.