Case File: Flowers (A Mandala Game)

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦	Players: 2-4
⏳	Time: 20-30 mins
🎂	Ages: 10+
⚙️	Mechanisms: Hand Management, Area Control

Spring has sprung here in Australia, so fittingly we’ve been playing Flowers from Lookout Games. It’s for 2-4 players and is a spin-off of the two player only game Mandala.

In Flowers, players take turns adding coloured cards to the three mandala locations. Once all six colours are present at a mandala it is scored. Whoever has the most cards on their side of it gets first pick of the point tokens.

Whoever has the most cards on their side, as long as one is face up, wins the mandala

If a player gets two tokens of the same colour they turn them over to form a flower, and once someone has three flowers the game ends. You tally up your points and whoever has the most is the winner.

The game ends as soon as someone has three complete flowers, but the other tokens still score

Flowers is such a pretty, relaxing game. On your turn you just need to play one or more cards of a colour to a mandala, and that’s it. If you only played one card you get to draw more, otherwise it’s the next players turn. You do need to be clever about what you plan and when, as sometimes you don’t want a mandala to score until you’ve had a chance to build up some extra cards on it.

While there are times when you are fighting for control of a location, the game never feels too tense and because there are three locations on the go at the same time it’s easy to pivot your focus to one of the others if needed. We did struggle with a few of the colours, especially the orange, as the card is a very different shade to the scoring token. There are also a lot of blues, and it can be hard to distinguish between them when determining what has already been played.

We’ve had fun playing at two, and while head-to-head competition isn’t our thing it was fine here and never felt like there was any take-that or meanness. It’s a nice little game and unlike the real thing, these flowers haven’t made me sneeze!

You can see the original post on Instagram here and if you are interested you can find out more about the game on the Lookout Games website!

The copy of Flowers used for this review was provided to A Tale of Two Meeples by VR Distribution