Dandelions Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Dandelions, a dice rolling and area control board game published by Allplay. Dandelions is a quick playing filler game and we help you decide if its right for your collection.

It’s a serene summer day, and you are a delightful little dandelion seed swirling in the breeze. Rolling green hills back up against a crystal-clear blue sky, and you float from garden to garden, not a care in the world. Until someone dislodges you, shifting the wind and blowing you into the wrong garden. This, you care a lot about. This means war. Dandelions is a compact dice game of area control about floating dandelion seeds for 2-3 players.

5 different garden tiles are arranged in the play area in ascending point order. Each player is assigned a color, everyone puts their pawn on the first available space in the first garden, and then everyone rolls their dice.

Every turn, players take one die from their pool and move their pawn forward the number of spaces shown on the face. If they land on the same space as another player, they ‘float’ forward that many spaces once again. Once they’ve reached their final destination they can ‘plant’ the die in that garden for scoring. If the die matches the value of any other players’ planted die, the other die is moved on a ‘gust’ to the next available garden. If players land on the start space, they reroll all of their unused dice.

The game ends when all players have planted all of their dice. There are two separate scoring conditions, ‘sprouts’ and ‘seeds’. To tally up the sprout’s score, every planted die gets points equal to the value of the garden it is planted in. Planting your dice in more valuable gardens will earn you more points. If the player has the most dice in a particular garden, they also get to add the pip value of those dice to their seed score.

In the event of a seed tie (all three players have 2 dice in the same garden, for example) the player with the lowest pip value in that garden wins. The tradeoff of which dice to