Go Apiary with the Polymino Gardening Game Flower Fields

By Keith Law | July 9, 2025 | 10:21am

Tabletop Reviews board games

Go Apiary with the Polymino Gardening Game Flower Fields

The light polyomino-placement game Flower Fields comes from two Italian designers named Luca who appear to mostly work on silly kids’ games, with this the first game either of them has designed that has a game weight rating over 2 (out of 5) on Boardgamegeek. It’s a bit similar to Patchwork, but different enough to stand on its own—especially since it plays up to four people—and to be worth getting if you enjoy that two-player classic.

In Flower Fields, each player gets a board with a 9×9 grid that has some polyomino tiles pre-printed on it in four colors, along with some hive spaces and spider spaces. They also start with five bees apiece. To start a round, the players set up a ring of polyomino tiles (that cover three to five spaces) on the table around a little central board that has spaces for four randomly chosen two-space polyomino tiles along with two bees. There’s a sun token in the ring indicating where it starts, and the player whose turn it is may take the first tile after the sun for free, or place one bee on any skipped tile to take one further down the line. The player then places that tile on their board adjacent to any previously placed tile (or the bottom edge, if it’s the first one). A player may instead take one of the smaller tiles from the center, paying two bees to do so, or simply take two bees from the supply. You may place a tile anywhere on your board, even if it covers something up.

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If the tile you place has an empty bee space on it, you may place a bee from your stash on that tile as long as you can pay the cost: You pay one bee back into the supply for every bee already in the same colored area as the bee you’re trying to place. Thus the first bee you place in any colored area is free, the second one requires paying one, and so on. You can skip this action, but it’s punitive to do so when the scoring comes.

Flower Fields board game

Once the tiles in the outer ring run out, the round ends. After the first two rounds, players get income—add up all of the visible hive symbols, subtract the visible web symbols, and receive that many bees. After the third round, you skip the income and go right to scoring.

For red, blue, and orange, you look at the largest contiguous area you have of that color, then count how many segments (not tiles—there are little boundary lines within the tiles) are in the area, and multiply it by the number of bees in the area for your points. You do this once for each color. White areas just score one point per segment in the area. You then get five points for each completed row and column on your board. For area, row, and column determinations, the preprinted tiles on your board do count as completed or part of a matching area. And that’s it—leftover bees aren’t worth anything.

It’s a bit of a glorified solitaire game, as there’s no real player interaction unless you’re competing for the same tile; in a two-player game you could mess with your opponent if you think you know the tile they want by moving the sun (which goes wherever the taken tile was) ahead of it, but I think doing so runs the risk of costing you more in bees or a lost opportunity than any benefit. There’s a solo mode that just has you randomly remove one of the next three tiles in the ring or remove a smaller tile from the center for your “opponent,” but it doesn’t score at all, and your own scoring is exactly as it would be in a multi-player game.

Flower Fields doesn’t quite get to the level of Patchwork, which also has players selecting polyomino tiles from a rondel and has its own little economy (of buttons, not bees), as it’s not quite as tense or directly competitive, but it does scratch a similar itch for placing that sort of tiles on your board, and the scoring is a little more involved and interesting. I’d say if you like those Uwe Rosenberg-designed polyomino games, like Patchwork, Cottage Garden, etc., you’d probably like Flower Fields, and it’s actually a better one to try with slightly younger players, too.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.