More and more often, you are in for a treat...or two on Board Game Arena!
Let me tell you about Flowers: A mandala game.
In this game, your goal is to collect flower tiles by achieving majorities through clever card play. Skillfully build mandalas to claim the best tiles, combining and multiplying them to create exquisite flowers of your own!
Each player starts with a hand of cards, with the cards coming in six colors that match the flower tile colors.
On a turn, a player lays down one or more cards of the same color onto one of the flowers. If that color is already present in the mandala, the player then flips the card(s) face down; if not, the player leaves them face up. If the player laid down one card, they draw two cards from the deck; if they played two or more, they do not draw any cards.
After playing, if you have at least one face-up card on a flower and more cards than any other player, take that flower's "claim" token and place it on your cards. Then, if that flower now has all six colors face up around it, destroy the mandala.
Whoever has the claim token on their cards places one of the flower tiles from this mandala in front of themselves; if they already have a flower tile of the same color, they flip this "complete" flower face down. Whoever has the second most cards on this mandala takes the second flower tile. Anyone who took a flower tile discards all of their played cards on this mandala; everyone else returns their played cards to their hand. Draw a black tile and white tile from the stack to create a new mandala.
Continue play until someone completes their third flower, then everyone scores their points. Each separate flower half is worth as many points as the number of flowers on it. For each complete flower, if one of the tiles is 3x, triple the number of flowers on the other tile; if both tiles have flowers, double the number of flowers on the tile with fewer flowers. Whoever has the most points wins.
Simple, elegant. And you can play it now with 2 to 4 players, right from your browser, by clicking below:
https://boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=flowersmandalagame
Let us send some love to the Lookout Games team for this nice addition to the platform. All of our thanks also goes to the game designers Trevor Benjamin and Brett J. Gilbert, and of course, to the developer, Firgon, who did an amazing job porting it to BGA.
And that's not all...
Let us welcome the all-new expansion added to Catan: Cities and Knights!
Expand Catan with a more complex commodity market and knights to defend your cities.
The game changes the base game in three main ways:
First, there are 3 new commodities in the game, distinct from resources- paper, cloth, and coins, which can be acquired from Forest, Meadow, and Mountain spaces, respectively. Cities that would normally produce two of one of those resources instead produce 1 resource and 1 of the corresponding commodity. (To make commodities easier to obtain, each player starts the game with 1 city and 1 settlement on the board.) These commodities allow players to build city improvements that confer various advantages and eventually points.
Second, the deck of development cards is replaced by three different decks, each corresponding to one of the commodities. Building city improvements gives players a chance to draw these cards with every roll of the dice. Building more improvements will increase these chances, but cards cannot be bought directly in any way. These cards are similar to the development cards in the base game, but with a wider range of effects. (Some cards are balanced better as well- the new Resource Monopoly card, for example, can take no more than 2 of the named resource from any one player.)
Finally, players can also build knights on the island along their network of roads. These knights can be used to claim certain intersections and move the Robber (taking the place of Soldier cards), but are also used to defend the island from periodic barbarian attacks. If the island is successfully defended, the player(s) with the most knights are rewarded. If not, the player(s) with the fewest knights each have a city downgraded to a settlement.
You can play it by activating the expansion from your game settings before playing, right from the game page.
Let us thank the Catan team, and the work done by dahrf to bring it to Board Game Arena!
That's it for today.
Let's dive into these releases and until next week...
Take care and play fair!
