Valley of a Thousand Flowers (Boardgame)

Valley of a Thousand Flowers is a board game created by Doebi and Thomas (ananasblau) during the 2013 game jam at the Ars Electronica Festival hosted by Austria Game Jam. It was Doebi's very first game and Thomas' ~20th game but the first board game.

On Friday evening we did sketch the basic gameplay and a few versions of the rules and started with the hexagons for the tiles. Saturday midday we cut out a sheet of hexagon tiles and had the first playtest going followed by many more during the day with various visitors. All in all making a board game is a lot more fun than making a video game, you have a playable game within an hour or two and then spent the rest of the jam making up new or better rules. There's also no element of stress if the jam has a deadline.

Rules

1. The player with the smallest garden or least number of plants in her care receives the player token and is the first player to start.
2. Each player receives 10 flowers in their colour for their hand.
3. The map is prepared by drawing random tiles and placing them in a compact shape.

Sequence of Play

Each player's turn has a few actions:

1. Take a new random tile and add it to the map. Make sure that features like rivers or roads do match.
2. The player places one of the flowers from her hand on the map. The player can only place on an empty tile or a tile where she already has flowers.
3. The player places any amount of flowers from her hand on the weather chart and the wind rose. The flowers on the weather chart remain there until the next time the player can change the chart, the flowers on the wind chart are returned to the player at the end of the round.

Wind and weather

After each player had her actions the end of the round consists of following actions:

1. Calculate the wind direction. If there are two flowers on oppsoing sides of the wind rose they neutralize each other. Flowers on adjoining directions will allow the player to choose choose the direction of their liking.
2. Read the weather chart to find out the weather factor for this round.
3. A fire or flood weather will mean no wind-seeding will happend and instead only the forest fire or river floods take place and all flowers are removed from the corresponding tiles. In case of a fire the wind factor also must be taken into account and any neighboring tiles in the direction of the wind are also cleared of flowers.
4. A weather factor of 0 ends the round and no wind-seeding can take place.
5. For any other weather factor, count the number of tiles each player has flowers on. Multiply with the weather factor and round down the number. 5 tiles with a weather factor of ½ will mean the player can take 2 flowers for her wind-seeding
6. Each player, in the order of the round, places her newly gained flowers on the map according to the wind direction and wind strength. As a start she can only go from tiles she has at least one flower on and only can start from each tile once.
7. Mountains will require a slow down the wind seeding, thus requiring the seed might only cross the mountain and land on the same tile rather than on the next tile.
8. The player puts any remaining flowers on her hand and also doesn't have to wind-seed at all.

After the wind-seeding the player token is moved to the next player and the next round starts.

End of game

The game ends when all tiles are placed.

After the game ends the tiles are counted and players are awarded 1 point for each tile the have the majority and 2 points for each tile they fully planted with their flowers.

Credits

• Doebi
• Zauberfisch for printing the hexagons
• Astrid and Lina for drawing many of the tiles of the second prototype
• ananasblau