Gnomes are annoying little creatures, what with their “collecting” mushrooms and flowers that aren’t theirs and messing with each other’s carefully laid pathways. The 2024 game Gnome Hollow gives each player two gnomes to move around the garden and the markets to try to create completed paths to gather those items for scoring—but another player can lay tiles that help them and make it harder for you, one of the ways this game takes some typically solo pursuits and infuses more player interaction.
Gnome Hollow is the first game from designer Ammon Anderson, whose second game, Twinkle Twinkle, will be out early in 2025. This game is ultimately about tile-laying and set collection, as on every turn you have to place two tiles, either from the market or from your personal supply if you have any there, and then move one of your two gnome meeples to any of four areas so you can claim something of value.
The core of the game is laying those hexagonal tiles to build paths. Once you’ve completed a path that crosses at least three tiles, you can claim it if your gnome is already somewhere on it or if there are no gnomes on it, taking one mushroom per matching symbol on the path itself, saving those to sell at the market. You take one of your eight ring markers from your board and move it to any available space under the number of tiles in the path; paths of five to seven tiles get you significant bonuses, including letting you place two markers at once, while paths of three to four tiles don’t get you anything extra. Then you move one of your two gnomes to a new location—to another path to claim it, to the mushroom market, to a signpost to get a bonus, or to the flower fields to get another flower for end-game scoring.
Play continues until one player has placed all eight of their ring markers, after which each player gets one more gnome action (but doesn’t get to place more tiles), and then you score. During the game, you can trade in sets of two or more mushrooms of a type for points, with rarer mushrooms worth more points for bigger sets. Each mushroom type has its own row with spaces for specific numbers of mushrooms in the set, with sets of three or more blocked once a player has turned in a set of that number of mushrooms of that type. So the first player to turn in a set of four purple mushrooms places a marker on the four box in the purple row, and no other player can claim it—they can turn in three mushrooms, or turn in five, but even if they have four mushrooms they can only take the bonus for three.
At game-end, you score on a rising scale for every ring marker you’ve moved from its original spot to a column for a completed path, and on the same scale for every unique flower you’ve collected either by sending a gnome to the flower market or by moving the ring markers beside the second, fourth, and sixth spaces in that row, with a maximum of 28 points for each of those areas. Then you add the points you collected from selling sets of mushrooms, and that’s your total. Leftover mushrooms are worthless except as the tiebreaker—whoever has the most would win a tie.
The scoring is simpler than the game play, and the game can get pretty vicious if you want to play it that way. You can’t add a tile to someone else’s claimed path without their permission, but you can play a tile nearby to make it harder for them to close their ring. You can strategically claim spots on the mushroom board to block other players, especially for the most valuable places in each row—six purples for 15 points, seven pinks for 12 points, and seven blues for 12 points, each of which is worth three points more than the previous spot in that row. The strongest move to screw with your opponents, however, is ending the game abruptly by finishing a six- or seven-tile path that lets you place your last two ring markers in a single move; other players can sort of see it coming, but I’ve found there’s enough cognitive load here in monitoring your own situation and looking for tiles that might help you close a ring that I can still be taken by surprise.
I don’t love how little control you have over the tiles in Gnome Hollow, and that ultimately gives the game a bigger randomness factor than I want in a game of this weight. You can only choose from the eight tiles on the garden board, whether it’s for your regular turn or for the ring marker bonus that lets you take a tile for your supply to use on a later turn, and those tiles are drawn at random from the bag. It’s not uncommon to see no tiles that fit the ring(s) on which you’re working, and you have no way around it. (There are some wildflower bonus tiles you can get during the game, but they don’t entirely mitigate this issue.)
Gnome Hollow is a very solid game, with reasonably quick turns and a streamlined scoring system that avoids what at first glance looked like it might be a point salad mess. It didn’t make my top 10 games of 2024, however, because it wasn’t as fun as I hoped it would be—you have such narrow paths (pun intended) to points that the tile-laying moves seemed completely obvious, and so there’s more of a luck-driven race for the highest-value spaces on the market board than a strategy-driven one. My objective side says it’s a good design, and my subjective side wanted something a bit more fun or challenging.
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.
