Floristry is a two-player auction game, which is a contradiction in terms when it comes to the board game world—doesn’t an auction require at least three people to function, or to at least be enjoyable in a competitive way? By using the mechanic of a Dutch auction, however, it does marry an auction mechanic to a two-player game in a way that works pretty well, although I wish the other parts of the game were a little more complex.
In Floristry, players compete to fill their frames with rectangular tiles that show two flowers on them, building contiguous groups of the same flower type to maximize their scoring. The game requires the use of a free browser-based app that tracks the auctions and how much money each player has remaining, as there’s also a bonus at the end of the game for each player’s cash on hand.
A Dutch auction starts at a high price and comes down until someone accepts the current figure, ending the auction and giving that bidder whatever the goods are at that final price. In Floristry, each round has a very simple auction for four tiles drawn randomly from the supply. The app starts each round at five coins, then drops the price every few seconds until one player taps their side of the screen to buy. They get their choice of three of the four tiles and they pay the amount they bid; the other player gets the fourth tile for free.
After 10 rounds, players score their flower groups and compare their remaining coins. There are six flower types, easily distinguished by both color and shape, and you score points based on the size of your largest contiguous group of each type, requiring a group of three to get any points at all, maxing out at 10 points for a group of 12 flowers or more. Only one player scores for coins, as it’s based on the difference between the two players at game-end, so a player who is lagging behind in acquiring tiles may choose to bid slowly—or not at all—and hope their opponent doesn’t catch on, bidding early each round to increase the gap between their coin totals.
Floristry’s best attribute beyond the auction mechanic might be the components—the wooden tiles are sturdy and the painted flowers really pop, while the scoring card forms a cute easel (like a sidewalk sign) that is totally unnecessary but that looks good on the table. Your scoring markers are wooden cats, which, I don’t know, my cats try to eat plants around the house so I’m not sure that’s a good idea, but I do like cats in games.
It seems significant to me that the designers, David Gordon and TAM, did something that we haven’t seen before: It’s a real auction in a two-player game where the bidding remains competitive, and the coin difference scoring serves as a balancing mechanic. That alone may make Floristry important in the history of board games, but I’m not sure it makes the game a must-have, because everything after the auction is so simple. It’s a tile-laying game and the strategy you need for this kind of scoring is so simple that there just isn’t a ton of game left there. You can rip through a game in probably 10 minutes, no more than 15, and I don’t see a lot of replay value here. I’m glad Floristry exists, for sure, and I believe we will see a lot of games that build on what these designers did, using the same sort of Dutch auction mechanic in a two-player game while layering a more complex game on top of it.
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.
