Floriferous Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Floriferous, a set collection card game published by Pencil First Games. In Floriferous, players are moving through the garden trying to collect flower and scoring cards.

Ah, the life of the gardener. Cultivating plant life, watching the interaction between flora and fauna, the sun warming a cheek with the grit of the rich earth between fingertips. The imagery of this space conjures a safe and inviting environment, one of reflection and interconnectivity, one of joy. But what happens when another person enters your garden and picks that daisy you’ve had your eye on all morning for your next centerpiece arrangement? And what if that daisy also held your favorite butterfly that you desperately needed to represent the progress of your bountiful creations?

Floriferous—a one to four player card game designed by Steve Finn and Eduardo Baraf, with illustration from Clémentine Campardou—looks to answer important gardening questions such as these. It’s published by Pencil First Games, a company known for another plant-based card game, Herbaceous. Let’s pour some tea, gather some stones, and put our nose to the petal for a glance into the garden life.

In Floriferous, the objective is to pick, pair, and organize flowers based on the arrangement, bounty, and desire cards that become available over the course of play. Each game finds players moving their gardener pawn along a grid of five columns of possible flower options, selecting a row to gather a card into their tableau, and waiting on other players’ selections before determining who goes first in the next round.

The number of rows in the grid changes based on player count, but the bottom row always features desire cards that provide potential point scoring options.