I was persuaded to buy this (back the Kickstarter campaign) by Becca Scott with herreview that was full of joie de vivre. Obviously, I’m not Becca Scott, so you may find this review a little pedestrian by comparison.
In the game of La Fleur you build alluring gardens in order to gain prestige. The player with the most prestige after Le Grande Soiree round is declared the winner. There are five basic kinds of allure – architecture, paths, water, flowers, and vistas plus a sixth, wild allure. Hmm, wild allure, if only there were a phrase in French for an ineffable, inexplicable something or other… Yes, I’ll probably house rule the wild allure to je nesais quoi when I play this in future. The allure types are differentiated by colour and symbol. All the colours are quite washed-out pastels, so the addition of symbols is good for anyone struggling to differentiate. However, the water symbol is likely a representation of a waterlily and as such looks a little similar to the flower symbol. The wild symbol is a fleur-de-lis.
Even the reverse of the board is covered in flowers!
I was persuaded to buy this (back the Kickstarter campaign) by Becca Scott with herreview that was full of joie de vivre. Obviously, I’m not Becca Scott, so you may find this review a little pedestrian by comparison.
In the game of La Fleur you build alluring gardens in order to gain prestige. The player with the most prestige after Le Grande Soiree round is declared the winner. There are five basic kinds of allure – architecture, paths, water, flowers, and vistas plus a sixth, wild allure. Hmm, wild allure, if only there were a phrase in French for an ineffable, inexplicable something or other… Yes, I’ll probably house rule the wild allure to je nesais quoi when I play this in future. The allure types are differentiated by colour and symbol. All the colours are quite washed-out pastels, so the addition of symbols is good for anyone struggling to differentiate. However, the water symbol is likely a representation of a waterlily and as such looks a little similar to the flower symbol. The wild symbol is a fleur-de-lis.
Even the reverse of the board is covered in flowers!
Gameplay
La Fleur is a reasonably straightforward worker placement game with strong competition for resources. Teaching the game is quite quick.
You are trying to build the most prestigious garden for your chateau during the French Rococo era. To do this, you acquire flower cards and use the flower cards and your artisans to build garden features in the hope of attracting visitors to your garden. The game board has worker placement spots, some of which have attached card decks and markets. There is the flower market where you gain flowers. Some flowers are free but the better ones have a cost in coins – wild allure flowers cost one coin and double allure flowers cost two.
At the garden features’ spot you can buy a garden feature, choosing from the face up cards there and paying the cost in flowers. The garden features all have an allure value, which is both the cost to purchase it and the value in accumulated allure that it gives once it is bought and placed in your tableau. Allure from garden features is tracked on your player board. There are several sources for the allure to pay for garden features, firstly the allure symbols on flower cards, next is the allure symbol on any artisan cards you have and finally, if all else fails, you can discard two flower cards to generate one allure of any kind. A point to note here is that you are discarding these cards, so the allure symbols on them are completely irrelevant. In the worst case you could be discarding two double allure flowers to generate only one allure of the type you really need – obviously this would be a desperate move and horrendously inefficient.
For the artisans, you start the game with two artisans, which are each represented by a card attached to your player board and above it a worker pawn that allows you to take actions. The artisan card has an allure symbol in the top right which can be used to pay toward the cost of garden features, but only once per round. Once you have used an artisan card (and it doesn’t have to be the card for the pawn that triggered the garden feature action space), you tilt the card by 45 degrees to show it has been used. The cards are all reset in end of round clean-up.
Since artisan cards represent your workers, you might want to get extra ones. You start with two and your player board has spaces for four in total. However, each new artisan costs eight coins, which can be somewhat difficult to come by. The rulebook suggests balancing the desire for more actions through extra artisans against not losing out on the race to gain prestige and hence visitors. You can also exchange an artisan for half the cost, four coins, and you might want to do this to improve the diversity of icons or abilities. Each artisan has a special ability, which will trigger a small bonus when you select the corresponding action with that pawn. For example, one artisan has the ability, when visiting the flower market, to refill empty spaces in the flower market. In general, these would remain empty until the end of round. To be clear, any artisan can be used in any worker placement spot, but they only get the buff if they visit their particular spot. The artisan deck is a worker placement spot on the main game board, but there is no market, so you are always drawing blind from the deck unless another effect overrules that. Getting extra workers is about as hard and costly as increasing your family in Agricola.
There are three more worker placement spots on the main board. One is a space labelled “Coin”, where you can gain two coins from the supply by placing a worker. Nextis a spot called “Prestige”, and this allows you to increase your prestige by one, but each player can only place one worker there each round. Prestige is tracked on the mainboard.
Finally, there is a “Special Invitation” spot next to the display of face-up visitor cards. These visitor cards will, at the end of round, go to the chateau with the highest allure corresponding to their allure symbol. Note that it has to be the unique highest, in the case of ties, the visitor is like the proverbial donkey between two hay piles, they cannot decide and thus do nothing. I’ve just looked it up and it’s known as Buridan’s Ass. Some visitors do not have an allure symbol on their card, and they select a chateau based on the text conditions at the bottom of their card. The special invitation spot allows you to break ties in your favour. Place a worker here and then select a visitor. If you are tied for that visitor – and it could be that everyone has zero of that type of allure – then you win the tie and the visitor comes to your hay pile, errr, sorry, your chateau.
The other thing that the special invitation is useful for is romance! If you have five or more of a visitor’s particular allure type and you issue a special invitation to that visitor, and they visit your chateau (i.e. no-one else acquires more allure of that type than you have before the end of round) then you can woo them. Wooing them turns them into your companion. After resolving visitor effects, which can be to gain coins or flowers or prestige, the visitor cards are returned to the discard pile. The exception to this is companions. You can only have one companion and there is no divorce, but that means their effect becomes a permanent once-per-round effect for you. Choose and woo wisely.
There is no limit to the number of visitors that you can receive, thus it is entirely possible for one player to have a runaway success in a particular round where all the visitors go to them.
There are four types of garden feature effect – “when played”, “when visited”, “end of round” and “game end” – which denote when the effect triggers. Note that the “when visited” effect triggers when a visitor of the indicated type visits your chateau.
Artwork
There are flowers everywhere, which is as you would expect for a game called “La Fleur“. The artwork is really beautiful and very much evokes the Rococo theme. That also extends to the graphic design where the font used in the rulebook displays swashes on the “F” and “L” in shadow capitals on the front page and on the “S”, “B”, “T” and particularly the “A” in the titling font. Just lovely. The same titling font is also used on the cards. Also worth mentioning are the allure icons, which are represented by a gold-leaf symbol on a coloured background, so you can recognise them by either the colour or the symbol. This has to be a 5/5 for artwork.
Likes and dislikes
Obviously, from my previous comments, I love the graphic design and how it complements the theme. I liked the layout of the rulebook – I think it’s simple, clear, and a joy to read. It also makes it easy to read the rules together and get started right away.
Complexity
I don’t think this a complex game, or at least, it doesn’t feel like it. You are collecting allure from garden features to attract visitors and score prestige. There are no hidden objectives, no multiple-routes-to-victory, no point salad, so I think this is probably a 3/5for complexity.
Replayability
There are plenty of cards in the base game in the flower deck, the features deck and the visitor deck to ensure variation in gameplay, but ultimately, it’s a relatively simple game. There is some asymmetry in the character cards, which grant abilities if you collect particular allure icons. So, I think I would give it a 3/5 for replayability, perhaps 4/5 with the expansions.
Player interaction
La Fleur has three markets for cards (Flowers, Features, Visitors) and competition for these can be fierce. The interaction comes from deciding where to go first and possibly denying another player access to a particular card. If you don’t watch what others are doing, there is a very real danger of one person completely running away with the game. Some visitor cards afford a possible catch-up mechanism, where they will visit a chateau for reasons other than the most allure of their type. However, this is quite minor, so you need to have your wits about you to prevent a runaway victory from an opponent. With this in mind, I think La Fleur deserves a 4/5 for player interaction.
Component quality
The components are gorgeous – linen effect cards in standard and tarot sizes, wooden pieces, some of which are screen printed. My KS version has the metal coins, which add to the feel of a luxury product. The box and insert are also excellent and make for sensible storage and easy setup. I would rate this a 5/5 for component quality.
Conclusion
If you like Splendor, then La Fleur has similar mechanics – collect this to collect that – but is more complex and has much stronger theming. I really like this game, but I appreciate that it might not appeal to everyone – some may find it a little bit too light. I think it depends on what you’re in the mood for, something light, airy and pleasant, like eating a salad in a Rococo Garden? Well, this would be ideal. I’ll give La Fleur a 75% overall – a delightfully pretty game.
