A Gentle Rain`
This is currently Waterstones Game of the Month and it looked so pretty and sounded such a gentle game I had to buy it immediately and it seemed as though this would be a perfect time to start the occasional unboxing/game play series.
TAKE A DEEP BREATH, AND RELAX…
You have come to the lake hoping to see a rare and beautiful sight. The lilies of the lake only open their blossoms in the rain, and only rarely do all eight kinds of lily bloom at once. The goal of A Gentle Rain is to place the lake tiles in such a way to cause all eight types of lilies to bloom before you run out of tiles and the rain ends.
Place each new tile you draw next to a tile already in play, making sure to match the colors of all the tile edges touching the tile you are placing. Each time you manage to complete a square of four touching tiles, a blossom opens between them.
Keep Score, or don’t.
Every review I read of this was how gentle and contemplative this game was going to be, that there was no pressure, no real need to point score, no real need to win.
This sounded perfect for my current state of mind!
The contents of the box are quite straightforward:
- 1 Rulebook
- 8 Lotus Tokens
- 28 Tiles
That’s it, and the box it came in is good enough but I think I’m going to transfer it all to a nice cloth pouch to make carrying it round that little bit easier.
That was as simple as everyone said, opened the box and had finished the first game within 15 minutes, very low learning curve but lots of thought in the placement of each tile which got trickier the more lotus that had blossomed.
The aim of the game is to place your tiles down one at a time, matching flowers on the edges, so yellow to yellow, and if there are more to match making sure both do.
Your eventual aim is to create holes that you can fill with a lotus token, the lotus token has to match one of the four flowers surrounding the hole though, so as you use lotus your options start narrowing and the later tiles take longer to place than the first ones. Though now I’ve played through I may be more careful in my initial placements.
Scoring is easy as well, if all your lotus bloom before you run out of tiles you score 8 + number of unused tiles (my initial score for the above game was 10 as I had two unused tiles). If you use up all your tiles you score the number of lotus that have bloomed.
That’s it…
I really liked this, simple yet beautiful with a little added complexity as the game progresses. This is a great game to grab and clear your mind, no setup and easy breakdown makes it a really, really low commitment game at the end of a long day or if your waiting for your gaming friends to show up and others can join in and take turns with the placement of tiles at any point during play.