Wildblooms
- Board's Eye View
- 28 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Wildblooms is a light drafting game from Kosmos with a horticultural theme. It's designed by Kasper Lapp, with appealing wild flower art from Fachri Maulana, and it takes 2–5 players.
You take wild flowers from a central board and 'grow' them according to the background of the area of the board from which the flower was picked. Whichever background is used, all the players get to advance a token on all their flowers of the corresponding colour. If moving a token gets it to a coloured spot on the flower, then tokens are advanced on everyone's flowers of that colour too, and so on. Along the way you can also pick up various insect meeples that have different effects.
This is a game where you'll almost always trigger a cascade of actions, both among your own flowers and those chosen by other players. If you're playing it as a relaxed easygoing game then you can enjoy Wildblooms as a zen experience. If you are highly competitive - or worse you're playing with someone else who is highly competitive - then paradoxically Wildblooms can be a stressful nightmare to play. If a player is intent on working out in advance precisely all of the actions triggered by their selection - including those triggered from everyone else's flowers - that can be a recipe for serious AP (analysis paralysis) which can make Wildblooms a painfully slow play.
It's best then to go with the flow and just focus on your own board without mithering overly about how your selection might benefit another player more than you. Play it this way and it'll take around 30 minutes for a game, and with everyone fully involved throughout. Expect to up that figure very considerably tho' and allow for much downtime if players are insistent on fully mapping out every choice before they make it!
Wildblooms is attractively presented. There are racks for players to place out their fully grown flowers, creating an in-game 3D flower meadow display. The racks are a pain to assemble but it's a job you only have to do once because the box is large enough to accommodate them all fully assembled.
