Petal Plotters
- Board's Eye View
- 1 minute ago
- 2 min read
Designed by Evan Cheah and published by LUMA, Petal Plotters is a pocket-sized card game for 2–5 players. It's a microgame played with 17–25 cards, depending on the number of players.
The setting is a tropical garden that's threatened with an invasion of crickets. The cards all represent the garden's fauna and the players will be playing either to repel the crickets or as fifth columnists undermining the defence of the garden. You have a hand of 5–7 cards, again depending on player count, and each turn you play a card either face down to your tableau for its numerical contribution to the defence of the garden or to the discard pile for the text effect on the card.
The cards all have a positive number at one end and its negative equivalent at the other (tho' some cards show zero on both ends). That means the orientation of the card is crucial when you play it to your tableau. The last card in your hand must be played to show the win condition you are going for (ie: what you expect the total to sum to be when all players' tableau cards are flipped and revealed).
This is a game that plays super quick - it's unlikely to run to much more than 5 minutes - but still it offers meaty choices. As you look at your own cards you need to form a view on what you think other players are going to go for in terms of the overall defence of the garden. Will they be playing cards for their positive or negative values? This is an element mostly found in social deduction games, except that here everyone chooses their own role rather than having it assigned to them. Make sure you remember what you've played and in what orientation, however - once a card is laid down, you're not ordinarily allowed to peek at it.
You also have to choose whether to play cards to your tableau or for the effect on their text. The various text effects can be useful in ascertaining what others may be trying to achieve; for example, a flip action turns a card to its face up side and a rotate action switches its value from positive to negative (or vice versa). There are also text actions that remove a card from a tableau.
Petal Plotters packs a plethora of play in petite package. It's attractively presented, with art from Rebecca Duckett-Wilkinson. Our only gripe is that it can be hard to read the card text when cards are fanned in your hand. If you find this is a problem it's easily solved using card racks.
