Barton in Bloom

General

Many clarifications in rules and on judges based on feedback from blind play testing.

Fixes

• Fixed the backs of punchouts being flipped.
• Added clarification that the purchase bonus on the notice board can be used to buy fertilizer.
• Fixed ordering issues on player aids and added cost reference table to the back.

Artwork

Artwork has been created for all assets, this is has been generated using DALL-E 2.

Specialist Actions

The specialist actions have been updated. Now, rather than each specialist action being able to be taken any number of times (by paying escalating costs) each specialist action now provides one of 2 actions. If the action is taken by the relevant specialist both actions may be performed, if taken by any other specialist the player may pay £2 to perform both actions.

Decorations

The decorations have been updated, rather than decorating the village green for the fete, the players now provide flowers to the cenotaph at in the center of the village green.

Miscellaneous

• Some cost and rewards have been updated to make money tighter
• The name has been changed from "Florist" to "Barton in Bloom"

Actions

On the whole the specialist actions have been reworked so that they each have 2 options. All specialists can take either action and have the option to take both by paying £2. When taken by the relevant specialist both actions can be taken with no extra cost.

You may not take all specialist actions any number of times, instead, several of the actions can explicitly be taken multiple times at increasing costs.

The harvester rest action has been changed

Garden tiles

Garden tiles have been added which allow for building features in your garden (paths, lawns and ponds). They also have a variable number of flower bed spaces meaning players can adjust their tactics to plant lots of flowers vs completing sections quickly.

Added stream

Added a stream to each garden board. These make some of the garden sections easier to fill so that players can start gaining income faster helping speed up the start of the game.

Added secret judges

Players can now play one judge card face down in front of themselves as gossip. These are revealed at the end of the game and scored by all players in the same way other judge cards are scored.

Plant growth

Plants now no longer grow during the income, instead, when planted the plant gain tokens to reach their maximum size. They also receive a "growing" token which prevents harvesting the plant until they have performed one rest action.

Removed seed cards

Seed cards have been removed in favor of having static options (printed on the gardener). For now these are all identical but in future may be specialized based on gardener abilities.

Changed garden section completion bonuses

Rather than being fixed based on the column the completed section is in, upon completing a section the player now gets a choice of the 3 bonuses.

General

• Reduced the prestige gained from judges
• Increases the prestige from decorations
• Reduced costs of the decorations

Decorations

Extra tiles have been added that represent decorations around the village that a player can provide to get ready for the fête. This adds a set collection element to the game providing another significant points gain when compared to judge goals.

Fertilizer Tokens

Replaced the fertilizer tokens with special permanent upgrades that can be purchased through the purchaser rest action.

Get your hands dirty

Added a new "Gardener tile", this represents the player. This can be used once per rest cycle to take a single, non specialist specific action for free.

Contracts

To reduce the effect of contract completion slightly the contract deck has now been split into 3 (1 flower, 2 flower and 3 flower contracts). Each is stacked on one of the delivery trucks with the top card revealed.

After a contract is completed the next contract is only revealed after all sell actions have been taken.

This is a fairly beefy update with many changes to help simplify and streamline the game play as well as incentivizing players to build their garden up. The following are the most consequential changes.

General

Game board

Replaced the separate game board components with a game board that represents the scene in the village as players go about their day.

Game play

Removed garden beds

To simplify flower growing and to make engine building move the game forward the plant cards have been removed. Now, plants in the garden (previously called the landscape) will gain flowers that can be harvested and planted to have more flowers growing each time your gain income.

Thematically this make a little more sense, now players only have a single garden rather than having a special garden they reserve for entering competitions.

Removed Upgrade Market

The upgrade market was rarely used, from play testing it seemed that players were avoiding them as they didn't move the player forward towards the end of the game.

The most useful upgrades have been added as ornaments. These can be used to allow players to customize their engine as well as move towards the end of the game due to the space they take up.

The helper cards have been removed (for now) since they held back the players engine taking away money.

Judges

Blueprint cards have been replaced with judges. These represent the judges who will be awarding the garden prizes at the fête. Rather than players having private goals they commit to, they now have a set of judges that can be played and are then in effect for all players.

The maximum number of judges is limited to 6.

Rest Actions

The landscaper rest action has been changed to be more attractive throughout the game, providing a trickle of points

The harvester rest action has been changed to help your flowers grow (rather than harvesting). Previously, harvesting on rest was too powerful and players wouldn't take the harvest action.

Seed Cards

Seed money has been replaced with seed cards. These are cards that are dealt to all players at the start of the game providing tokens, actions or money.

Game Play

Market

Updated the market to now be split into three sections. As well as the ornaments there are now the improvements market (containing upgrades, plant upgrades and helpers) and the plant market.

In the improvement market cards decrease in value as cards are purchased and new cards are added at the highest value.

In the plant market, all plants are now available at all time (unless out of stock) but increase in cost as plants of that type are purchased. This allows players to always be able to purchase plants that are integral to their strategy but rewards players for purchasing them early.

Since the market now has 3 sections, the purchaser has the option to purchase from all 3 at once (rather than discarding the top of the deck).

Flower Cards

Added flower cards to the market, these are one shot cards that, when purchased provide a flower token and are discarded. They act as a "break in case of emergency" option when you want to complete something urgently.

Activation

Some cards now have an "activation ability". These are abilities that can be used instead of a specialist action and are refreshed every time a refresh action is taken.

General

Rearranged the player and main board to be better laid out.

Game play

Garden

Added a garden board for adding purchased market cards to. This has spaces that show income bonuses while uncovered as well as bonuses for covering these spaces with plants.

This takes the place of the money gained when resting a worker so that all bonuses are now in income further simplifying the action board.

Landscape

In the previous version the contracts were a much more attractive prospect than the landscape, this was due to them giving the same prestige per flower as adding them to the landscape (i.e. 1 prestige per flower).

To address this balance and make the contracts more focused on money than prestige, the prestige value of each contract is reduced by 1.

The landscapes have also been updated to make it easier to initially gain bonuses. Bonuses are now gained by completing 2x2 sections on the landscape. Each will give a one shot action as well as a permanent income for the rest of the game.

Blueprints

Blueprints give you end game bonuses for completing various achievements throughout the game (or give end game penalties if they are not complete). These help to incentivize completing the landscape.

Each player starts with a random blueprint and more can be gained during the game.

Market

The market has been changed to be 3 decks, a plant deck, an upgrade deck and helper deck. From each deck 2 cards are always available for purchase.

Player Abilities

Each player board has abilities, when cards are purchased players must decide where to place them in their garden covering one of their abilities or incomes.

Each player board also receives seed money based on their abilities.

These give each player varying starting engines to replace the seed cards.

Points

Most point gaining outside the landscape have been reduced or removed. Any actions that gave points for free or as income have been removed.

Prices

The prices of ornaments have been reduced so that in the later game multiples can be purchased at once.

Also the sell price has flowers has been increased and decreased the money gained by mowing lawns to make selling flowers preferable over mowing lawns and making mowing lawns a last resort action.

Game play

Ornaments

A new token type has been created called ornaments, which gnomes now belong to.

As with gnomes from previous versions, all ornaments are ignore placement rules in the landscape but offer no points at the end of the game.

Due to the size of the ornaments the landscape board has been increased to a 7x7 grid and the endgame completion points have been adjusted accordingly.

Action bumpers

Sections have been added to either side of the action rows to include the costs and demand upping portions of each action row, this allows actions to be read from left to right vastly improving readability of actions.

Specialist actions

The power of the specialist actions have been downgraded making each action only performed once. To help with the speed of the game players can now overpay the specialists to perform the action multiple times.

Rest Actions

Rest actions are now treated the same as other actions. This means game play is simpler with players just taking actions in turn as well as allowing for all parts of resting to be illustrated on the game board (rather than players remembering the steps).

Income

Removed the 'advance time' step of rest actions. The flower rotting is now part of the income.

Market

The market has been replaced with a set of market cards including flowers and upgrades for your garden.

Seed Cards

Seed cards have temporarily been removed as they no longer work with the new market. A new starting situation process will be added to help speed up the first few turn and to help adjust players initial engine.

Generic

Icons

Iconography has been added to most actions, for now we are also keeping text explanations.

Following Pass Actions

When a player passes, all other players are now able to also take the contractor action but only once. All players also being allowed to pass was often confusing and a little bit too powerful for players planting short time frame flowers if others are running long time frame flowers (since the later will need to pass far more often to be able to harvest).

This will also help incentivize players to push contractor values higher as they will get more out of the contractors action than the followers.

Actions

Players can now not move a worker by upping a dice and keeping them in place. Often it was very difficult (and unfun) to be blocked out of an action that is integral to your strategy.

Market

The market dice have changed to use a separate set of tokens in a bag. This makes updating the market much simpler and reduces the chances of a single flower becoming very common as when tokens are drawn from the bag the chance of drawing further tokens of the same type reduces.

Flower Growth

The plants have changed so that rather than flowering after a set amount of time each plant can now grow up to a maximum number of flowers which can be harvested all at once.

The plants that can grow more flowers are cheaper and yield less money.

Setup

During setup players will now receive a randomized set of resources to initially seed their boards (think mamas and papas in viticulture), this helps add variation to the first few rounds as players start of with some of the resources typically taken at the start of the game.

Action selection

The action selection has been overhauled (again). Rather than players having a pool of worker actions they instead have a shared pool of contractor actions that have benefits if used on specific actions.

The contractors become more expensive with each action they take until a player passes, removing one of the contractors from the pool, gaining a bonus based on the contractor type and it's current value.

Market

There is now a market for seed and gnome tokens. These will start populated with some tokens and as tokens are added or removed the values of the various tokens will increase and decrease.

Income

When passing, you now gain income based on how complete your landscape is.

Contracts

All contracts with greater than 3 flowers have been removed as these were far too swingy.

Landscapes

Landscapes have been changed so that rather than restricting flowers by neighbors each flower type is restricted to one per row and column, gnomes are still able to break this restriction.

When adding tokens to the landscape, all tokens after the first must be placed adjacent to any other token in their landscape.

The grid has also been reduced to a 5x5 square.

Action Selection

The action selection has been overhauled. The aim of this is to improve the flow of the game, removing the need for round ends.

Rather than selecting one action per turn each player will allocate any number of their actions and place them on one of the action spaces and perform that action once per action cube used. This helps make early turns a little more varied as players are more able to plan turns, allowing more efficient players will be able to get more actions before passing.

Passing

As well as the action selection changing, players now chose when to pass. When passing players retrieve all spent worker tokens as well as advancing time.

As well as passing themselves, when passing all other players also get the opportunity to follow and pass out of turn for free. At the start of the game it acts as a pseudo passing of the first player token. At the start of the game all players will run out of tokens will be running out of actions at the same time, meaning the first player will likely pass first so the next round of passing will start with the next player. As players get their engines going however, this cadence will be broken so more efficient player will be able to pass less.

Players will also be able to elect to pass at less opportune times for opponents to follow (such as when flowers would rot) allowing them to gain free passes when they eventually pass.

Actions

As well as changing the action selection process there are changes to the available actions:

• The actions performed by the contractors (other than the recruiter) have been added as basic actions to the players and the contractors have been simplified to be performing any number of the related basic action.
• The Seller has been removed. Selling individual flowers is very inefficient when players can complete contracts and players never used this contractor. This has been replaced with the purchaser.
• The harvest action now resets the time tokens on the flower so that it needs to bloom again.

Advancing Time

• When advancing time, flowering plants no longer gain time tokens, this was far too fiddly and was far too difficult to get the flowers needed ready on time, instead, plants now remain flowering. While this reduces the need to align your plants growth it is still beneficial for players to not waste actions planting flowers that will remain flowering for multiple turns.
• Fertilizers are now removed from beds when you advance time. The original idea for fertilizers was to give a consolation prize when flowers rot but since fertilizers never went away there was no real benefit in gaining lots of flowers in the composter as they would never be used making the composter feel really bad. By making fertilizers disappear, the composter feels a lot more like the consolation prize as originally intended.

First release of Florist!

In florist players play the roll of a florist vying to become the most prestigious florist in town. They will do this by buying and planting seeds, growing plants, harvesting flowers and creating the greatest landscape to wow the judges in the end of year festival.

On their turn players will take actions to gain and grow their plants employing the help of expert contractors who can do the work in a fraction of the time.

At the end of each round players will see their garden grow more fruitful for the coming rounds.