Vines and Flowers. How to Play. A Complete, Concise and Clear Board Game Tutorial
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Transcript
Build the flower bed outwards and outwards while collecting gorgeous flowers. It's a 3D tile placement in Vines and Flowers. And today we'll be teaching you how to play Vines and Flowers game designed by Honi Lee and Wu Ying and published by Wales Entertainment. We are using a prototype copy of the game so the rules and components may not be final. And check out the link to the project page in the video description below. And hello everyone. It's Stella and Taran here from Meville University. And hey, if you enjoy this video after watching, you really help us by like, subscribe, and let us know what you think in the comments. That seriously will help us to bring more videos. Now, let's get to the classroom. In Vines and Flowers, players are competing landscapers working to contribute the most and the best to a floral pagola.
Players will work tactically to buy the best tiles and build them into the pagola, earning colored petals as points as they make clusters of matching colored flowers. It's a battle of balance as players earn petals in four different colors, but when the game is over, score only for their weakest color. Whoever has the highest lowest score when the game is over will be the winner. To set up, lay out the pagola board in the center of the table, empty of tiles, but filled with all of the scoring petals. There are two types of tiles, flowers and hummingbirds. To set these up, from the flower pile, randomly remove 20 if you're playing a two-player game, or 10 if you're playing a three-player game.
You'll use all the tiles at four players. Then in all cases, add two hummingbirds to that set and mix the tiles up in the cloth bag. Then place the three remaining hummingbirds into their slots of the fulfillment board nearby. Make a supply of ladybugs and place two onto each hummingbird. Shuffle up the event cards and deal three in a row or column nearby. The leftovers won't be used and can be returned to the box. Keep the four hue tiles nearby and from right to left, deal out a market of five face up tiles from the cloth bag. Give each player a player screen. Each player now gains two petals in a single color as their starting petals. And to do this, take a single set of all four petals, shuffle them up, give one randomly to each player, and then give each player a second copy of the one they gained.
Choose a first player and you're now ready to play. Vines and Flowers is played in turns starting from the first player and going clockwise around the table. Your turn is resolved over four phases which must be resolved in order. These are the actions phase, fulfillment phase, hummingbird phase, and replenish phase. Most of your turns will only involve the first and last of those four phases. In your actions phase, you take two actions. And there are two different options for those actions. Those are to gain or use petals to purchase a tile from the market to your hand or to place a tile from your hand into the pagola, generally gaining colored petals as reward.
You may use your two actions in any combination. That is gain tiles twice, place tiles twice, or one of each. After actions is fulfillment, where you have the chance to display matching petals to gain a hummingbird and its ladybugs. Then the hummingbird phase, where a hummingbird at the front of the market may have an effect on all players. And finally, replenish, where you shuffle the market and refill it to five tiles for the next player's turn. Players continue taking turns round and round the table until one of two things happens. The first is if the cloth bag ever runs out of tiles. At that point, the game ends immediately. Players reveal their points and determine the winner. So now, let's have a look at each action and phase in detail.
The first action is to gain a tile from the market. At the start of your turn, there will be five tiles face up in the market, and they may be a mix of flowers and hummingbirds, and you can use this action to gain either type. You may always choose to gain the current rightmost tile in the market for free. Or you may skip over tiles by spending petals in any color combination from your supply and placing one of those pedals on each tile you skip. Any pedals on tiles are later gained by the player who picks up that tile using this action. Any empty spaces you leave in the market are not refilled until the replenish phase of your turn. And this consequently makes the costs of other tiles cheaper for the rest of your turn. When you gain a flower tile, add it to your hand of tiles beside your screen. You may hold at most three flower tiles, and you may not freely discard to make space. Once you have three tiles, you're not allowed to take the gain tile action.
When you gain a hummingbird, this is resolved quite differently. And I'm not going to go through this yet. I'll come back towards the end of the video and explain everything to do with the hummingbird tiles. The second action is to place a tile on the pagola. Take a tile from your hand and place it into any valid notch. This means there must be a match. If the notch has a flower, it must be placed with a matching flower. And if it shows a flowerless vine, then it must go in a slot with a flowerless vine. You're not allowed to join up empty spaces. So this would not be a legal placement. And you must be able to make the placement without disturbing anything already built. That means there's not enough space to place this flower underneath here. And on this corner, even though pink and yellow are the correct orientations to go into this slot, you can't place the tile there because there's no way of slotting it in without dismantling what's already present. After making a placement, if you create a complete flower, you will gain one or more petals in the matching color. You always gain one petal for the flower you created. And you gain an additional petal for each matching colored complete flower that you can reach from your flower through vines. This here is the only blue flower on this vine network. So you would score
one blue petal. Placing this tile would score two yellow petals. one for itself and one for this flower underneath to which it is connected. Only complete flowers count. So this flower here, which is connected through a path of vines, does not currently score since it's incomplete. But if placing this tile here, the player would gain a score of three yellow petals, counting all three of these flowers along the vine network. What breaks connectivity is a flower of a different color. Completing this yellow flower here scores only a single petal because this blue flower separates it from the others on this overall vine branch. This sort of unjoined corner also breaks the connectivity. So this placement would score for these two flowers but not for this one.
There's also an incentive to build the pagola upwards rather than simply outwards. The pieces that form part of the board are considered level one of the pagola. The first vertical tiles slotted into that are considered level one and a half. The next level up is level two and so on. If you are the first person to place a tile into a new whole numbered pagola layer and that placement was a flower match rather than a vine match, you score an extra bonus petal in the same color as the flower. This will only ever be for vertical tiles which form the start of new whole numbered layers. Horizontally placed tiles are never considered to form a new layer in this way.
If the tile you place has an animal printed on it, then resolve the bonus effect of that animal immediately after placing. There are four different animals. If you place the bee, then immediately take an extra action. That means you'll have three actions in this action phase. If you place the spider, immediately gain a tile from the market to your hand. This works the same way as the take a tile action, except you do not have to pay to take a tile that's not in the far right of the market. If you place a butterfly, take one of the four hue tiles from the supply and keep it with your hand. This does not count towards the hand limit of tiles that you can hold, but as part of any place tile action, instead of placing one of the standard square tiles from your hand, you can place your forw can be added to any flower slot and is always considered to match it. This here would be a threepoint placement.
Fourhues block off the ability for any future tiles to be placed out of that slot and they don't extend the dimensions of the pagola. That means it can never get the bonus for forming a new pagola layer even if a square tile in the same slot would have qualified. The forh is the only type of tile that can be slotted into a corner gap like this. And you choose one of the two sides of the corner to slot it into. It's never considered to create a bridge across that gap, even if the two corner flowers are the same color. Finally, if you play a ladybug, take a ladybug from the supply and store it behind your screen. Ladybugs are important because they count as wild colored petals for the purposes of final scoring. Remember, when the game is over, you're going to count up all four of your different petal colors, but your final score will be the lowest among those four types. So, this player has 14 total petals, but a score of only one because orange is the lowest with only one petal. With ladybugs counting as wild, you'll be able to bolster the petal colors where you have the fewest in final scoring, meaning this collection is now a score of two.
The other type of tile is the hummingbird tile. These can be purchased from the market and they form the basis of the fulfillment and hummingbird phases. And so in this section, we'll go through all of those to understand these tiles. There are five total hummingbird tiles in the game. Three of them begin the game locked on the fulfillment board and two of them begin in the bag, meaning they could come out into the market at any time. In your action phase, if you purchase a hummingbird tile, you do not add it to your hand. Instead, go to the leftmost event card, which doesn't currently have a hummingbird on it. Resolve the text on the right hand side of the card. This is called the personal effect, and it will be a positive effect for you. Then cover that side of the event card, thereby blocking the entire card out for the rest of the game.
As you can see, these personal effects can be quite tactically favorable, letting you manipulate the pagola or gain the pedals you need. Then, once your action phase is complete, you may optionally resolve the fulfillment phase where you claim one of the hummingbird tiles from the fulfillment board. The first player to do this displays four petals in a single color and as a reward claims the two ladybugs on that hummingbird tile. In this way, you're rewarded for having an excess of petals in one color, which probably won't contribute to your final score by gaining two ladybugs, which will take the hummingbird tile and add it to the bag. Doing this does not allow you to resolve any events. It simply puts the tile into the bag so that it can come out in the market later on. Then spend one of the pedals you displayed to mark the empty space. The second time someone fulfills in the game, they'll need to display five petals instead of four. And each time someone fulfills, it must be with a different colored petal to all previous fulfillments.
After the fulfillment phase, the third step of any player's turn is the hummingbird phase. And this occurs only if the rightmost remaining tile in the market is a hummingbird. When this happens, remove the hummingbird from the market and go to the leftmost unused event card and resolve the effect on the left. Unlike the personal effects on the right, these effects on the left resolve for all players. And it might be something that impacts every player. Or it might be something where you check among all players and then it impacts only one. Then cover that slot of the event card with the hummingbird. The final step of any player's turn is replenish. Slide all tiles as far to the right as they'll go and refill to a market of five.
The game ends immediately after the replenish phase in which one of two things happens. Either if the cloth bag is completely empty or if the fourth hummingbird enters the market. Specifically, that means count up all the hummingbirds in the market and on the events, ignoring any still on the fulfillment board. It's only if market plus events equals four hummingbirds that the game end triggers. Players now reveal their petals, assign their ladybugs across their lowest scoring colors, and determine their final score based on their single lowest scoring petal color. So, in this case, a final score of four. The player with the highest score wins. So, in this case, a score of four, beating a score of three. In the event of a tie, check your second lowest scoring color. So here, a second lowest score of five would beat a second lowest score of four. Continue going in this way until the tie is broken. And if still tied, victory is shared. Thanks for watching, and if you like this video, maybe you'd like to watch this next one. Have a great day. Say bye.