Top 5 Board Games That Feel Like Spring

5. A Gentle Rain

This one is available again, out of all of these board games A Gentle Rain was nearly impossible to get for a while. But it is back in stock or will be shortly. This game is a solo spring type of game for a relaxing and rainy day. All you do is build out a grid trying to get plants to grow. If you watch the symbols in the corners you get points. If you don’t, well, you just shuffle up the tiles and try again.

The spring elements for me, in the game, are the theme or rain which is very very loosely there. But it is more than just that, after coming out of winter, especially here in Minnesota, there is this idea of the first flower blooming as well. Things not being covered with snow or grime from the snow, but instead new life with the flowers and rain washing away that grime. So A Gentle Rain provides that feeling of spring for me.

4. Dandelions

Now we move on from a nice spring thing to another that could also easily be a summer theme in board games. Dandelions are a menace. But a lot of nature themed games seem to fit the spring theme.

Dandelions from All Play is clearly an abstract game with the theming of Dandelions. The closest thing that makes it feel like that is the artwork. But the game play you could argue simulates or works with the theme of dandelion fluff floating around as you try and collect the most of a number and the majority on tiles for the end game scoring. The game is simple and fun.

3. Meadow

Now we’re moving onto the biggest of the board games on the list. Meadow again has that nature theme to it that works well for summer. In Meadow you are building up your ecosystem of nature to score points. But as well shooting for certain combinations to take pictures and even get more points.

Meadow has some great mechanisms in the game. The biggest being how you get cards into your hand to play out. If you are familiar with Quadropolis, an older game, it does something similar. You play down a token that determines what row or column you’ll take a card from. So I might play a 2 down on the edge of column two. That means that I take the card that is two in from where I played my token. It’s a real puzzle to try and get what you want. And it can be prone, at times to analysis paralysis, especially towards end game.

2. Ohanami

We’re back into our simpler board games with Ohanami. This is a racko style game where you are drafting cards and then adding them to the top or bottom of three columns. The numbers always need to be in numerical order. Ohanami is a kind of cutthroat game at two, but a light fun game at four. Mainly because of how the scoring works where some cards score a few points every round and others score more in later rounds.

This one it is again that nature theme that makes it feel like spring. the flowering trees, the water, just everything gives it a spring feel. And like A Gentle Rain this is a relaxing game. Even with it being a bit more strategic and cutthroat in what you draft as a two player game, none of the decisions feel like they use too much brain space.

1. Floriferous

Finally we have Floriferous. This game is the first game I think of when I think of spring. It’s all about collecting beautiful flowers to get points. The main mechanism is an open drafting system where you draft from one column at a time. But you know what is coming up next, so that might impact how you draft one round. Because the row you draft in the column determines the order that you’ll draft in for the next column.

The game is one of those great balances of enough going on so it doesn’t feel like you’re just following a script. But there isn’t so much going on that you feel like you need your brain always engaged. It’s that good relaxing experience that I find I want with spring board games.

Final Thoughts

I’m sure there are other games that might make you think of spring more. But these board games on the list are some that I associate with spring. I think for me a lot of it is what spring in Minnesota is a nice time to get outside. It’s no longer 10 degrees, it’s in the 60’s and 70’s. And it is before it’s 90’s with 90% humidity. So it is that chance to comfortably go see nature again after it’s been hidden under snow.

And for me, coming out of winter, it’s nice to have that mind space that is freeing up in what I’m playing. Towards the end of winter, the last snow storm that happens at the end of March or beginning April, the snow gets you down. So my brain space can waiver for playing board games. I gravitate towards games that are a bit simpler. So a lot of the spring games don’t overwhelm you with rules.

What are some games that make you think of spring?

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So, one thing that I’d do differently, but I was glad that I did this time, was that we stayed at my friends parents place so we didn’t have to pay for a room, that saved a good chunk of change. The downside to it, was that their place was an hour and fifteen away from our parking spot. So that was a lot of driving at times. Now, if I were to do it again, I would maybe see about doing, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights at a hotel, but keep our same driving schedule of getting there on Wednesday and going back on Monday. That way my friend would be able to see his parents, but being closer to the convention would be really nice.

The other thing that I’d do differently is be a bit pickier on games. Now, I think basically all the games that we played in were great, and that it was a good number of games, I think we ended up doing six events in total, but we skipped one game on Sunday to get into a demo of another game. That was a great call, since as interesting as the Harry Potter miniatures game sounded, the price point was too high, so we likely wouldn’t have started playing it even if we loved it. Instead, we got to demo a game that we both decided we wanted after playing it.

That really takes me to one of the big highlights. There are so many games there, and we spent a ton of our time wandering the dealer floor and looking at games, getting games explained to us, and best of all, getting games demoed. There are so many games that if you didn’t want to, you wouldn’t have to do any organized events. We got to demo God of War, Deranged, Last Hour, Homebrewer, Bottom of the 9th, and so many more, and I’ll be touching on some of them in future articles. In fact, it took us a day and a half just to walk around what we thought was all of the dealer space, only to find that we had missed some and then remember that we had skipped some bigger booths to start because they were too busy when we went by them the first time.

Oh, and the events, the events that we went to were great. Marc Gunn performing Hobbit drinking songs was a fun and goofy old time. There was the North American Championships for Ice Cool (I was a semi-finalist), and that was a blast, most of the people were there to just have fun with it, so everyone was having fun. The best event was playtesting the Alpha version of Role Player Adventures. It’s a RPG-Lite sort of game, where it’s more about some dice manipulation, but we had a great group to play test with and we made some silly decisions and had a lot of fun with it.

There is so much to talk about, and I did pick up a number of things, so let me give a fast rundown of what I picked up:

1. Cowboy Bebop Boardgame Boogie – I like Cowboy Bebop a lot, and the game looked fun
2. Albion’s Legacy – Got this one for free with Cowboy Bebop, and it’s a big box game which is interesting.
3. Hats – Good simple card game with a lot of interesting and challenging choices. You kind of have to forget what you know about card games to get your brain wrapped around this one.
4. Cat Cafe – Cat Cafe is a roll and write, but it’s actually more complex than you’d think for the theme. Definitely a fun one with the time I played it.
5. Loup Garou – A choose your own adventure book, really, but you have a character sheet, so there’s a game element to it.
6. Detective: City of Angels – Big box detective game. In it, one person is the “chisel”, person giving clues, but they don’t want anyone to solve the case, but if they lie all the time, people will know that too. And all the detectives are racing to a solution.
7. The Grimm Masquerade – Which of the fairy tale characters are sitting around the table and trying to collect their item of choice? Can you call them out before they succeed, or maybe bust them with the item that they don’t want. Seems like a fun and interactive social deduction game with an actual game there.
8. Deception: Murder in Hong Kong & Expansion – Not a new game, but my favorite social deduction game.
9. Tokyo Highway & Expansion – Not a new game either, but hard to find, it’s a pretty looking wood game where you are building out roads and trying to be the first to place your cars.
10. Welcome To… Fallout and Spring Expansions
11. Sagrada Expansion

Oof, I have a lot of board games to get through. So I want to talk more about games that I demoed in a future articles, games that we paid for and played, including a Dresden Files skinned Savage World game, and more. There’s a lot to unpack and a lot of fun was had, and I definitely want to go again next year.

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