Gnome Hollow
- David Fox
- 9 hours ago
- 4 min read
There are varying degrees of interest in the board gaming hobby, from casual gamers who might turn up to a game night if their team isn’t on TV to the obsessives who make the pilgrimage to Spiel Essen every year come hell, high water or a distinct lack of storage space once the haul eventually makes it home. I am neither of those, but I do trend more toward the latter: running a game group, helping out at Gateway Game sessions, subscribing to a dozen board game podcasts and, even - you’d never guess - writing board game reviews. In among those podcasts, when the name of a new game keeps popping up it piques my interest and sometimes, just sometimes, that game becomes the Hot New Thing at the game group and you feel some pride that it was you who ‘discovered’ it.
Gnome Hollow by Ammon Anderson, published by The Op, was seeded in my consciousness when it was mentioned on several podcasts, particularly those that had attended the GAMA Trade Show. Apparently, it was quite the belle of the ball that year and had several publishers seeking to be the ones before the ones who get the credit at the game group. Thus on my radar, when the game arrived in the UK I made the extra effort to order it on its own, not even bothering to top up the box for the next level of discount. Punched; and a learning play on the day it arrived.
Gnome Hollow is, in a fungal roundabout way, a set collection game in which each set that gets collected throughout the game needs to be different to any other set - bar pairs - in order to score baubles and trinkets which serve as Gnomish victory points. 'Fungal roundabout' is technically accurate, as a large part of the game is piecing together mushroom fairy rings of varying lengths from tiles drafted each round, which reward you with coloured mushrooms, and it is those mushrooms you make into sets to trade in at the Stump Market for victory points. The hexagonal tiles have a few placement restrictions, notably that you can only join a fairy ring that someone else is in the process of making as long as you get their permission. Not that you couldn’t - a la Carcassonne - make it very hard for them to finish a ring by placing your tiles awkwardly, so that their perfect finishing piece might not even exist.
While being blocked is irksome, you can move one of your two screen-printed gnomes away on your turn to start anew elsewhere but that does leave the previous mushroom trail available if anyone does want it. Moving gnomes also allows you to take bonus actions inside completed rings and trade at the aforementioned Stump, which you may well want to do if the specific 4 Purple Mushroom set or 7 Yellow Mushroom set is about to be gobbled up by another player. In the process of doing all this, you are slowly filling in your own magnetised player board, scoring bonuses there too, up to the point when the game ends when a player makes their eighth ring or collects their eighth flower, or the tiles run out.
Gnome Hollow is nicely produced with those magnetic player boards being the stand-out components as your tall tokens stick exactly where they’re supposed to; it’s certainly a more elegant solution than cubes and double layer boards. The art by the designer and Patrick Spaziante is on the right side of cutesy and certainly helps with engagement as you move your two characterful gnomes - Betty & Beatrice, Gourd & Peanut - around on their day-to-day fungi farming. The rulebook, tho' large and quite spaced out, teaches the game well with plenty of examples and also serves as a good reference during play. Tho', having recently started seeing recycleable inserts in other games, I was disappointed to see a plastic one here, even if well designed.
There wasn’t much buzz about the game when it did get released and - having just guessed 'in the 3000s' - a quick search finds the game currently ranked #3381 on BoardGameGeek, which is about right. With no original mechanisms, the game relies on giving its 2-4 players interaction points within the drafting, tile-laying and the set collection, along with the prime puzzle of building those fairy rings. The two-phase turns are neither so restrictive as to make one feel like you can’t do enough nor generous that the pitfall of it being too easy to collect things is avoided.
What Gnome Hollow isn’t is exciting. I’d certainly not use the pejorative JASE to describe it ('Just Another Soulless Euro') because it genuinely feels like there is a soul behind the design and, to be fair, the production; it doesn’t feel like a product that only cares about the bottom line. But, as a lifelong gamer and coming up on two decades back in the hobby after a break, it didn’t excite me in any way, nor elicit a feeling of 'I could do better if...' or 'How about playing this strategy...'; it is predominantly tactical from that point of view.
I did try the game out at a Gateway Game session - requested because of its cute ‘shelf presence’ - and, of the three players I taught it to, two ‘got it’ and said it was OK but it was a dismal failure with the third. Not necessarily the game’s fault: it doesn’t pretend to have Spiel des Jahres-type elegance of rules and I would generally shy away from Kennerspiel-level games at such sessions, so maybe that’s not a particularly useful real world assessment. But I wasn’t enthusiastic in my plays of the game to the point where I wanted to try it again, nor introduce it to anyone else, let alone my game group.
So, as of now, Gnome Hollow is on my trade pile, slowly shrinking in price like an aging mushroom, until it reaches the point where either someone gets it for a bargain price or it goes to the charity shop in the hope that someone new might find the hobby’s three thousand three hundred and eighty first best game to be the right game for them.
(Review by David Fox)
