Winner of the 2018 Best Combinatorial Game Award, Blooms is a 2-player territory game played on a hexagonal board. It’s a bit like the classical game Go, but shorter, easier to learn, and more colorful. A painting in an Oregon coffee shop inspired me to design it:

I loved the painting’s colors, and I wanted to make an abstract strategy game that would tickle my eye the same way. So I did and it became one of my favorites of my games. Here’s an introduction.

Contents

Rules

Definitions:

Bloom: a bloom is an entire group of connected stones on the board of the same color. A single stone (unconnected to others of the same color) is also a bloom. For example there are four Blooms in this image:

Fenced: a bloom is fenced when there are no empty spaces adjacent to any of the bloom’s stones. For example, the red bloom is fenced here:

Gameplay

Each player owns 2 colors of stones. To start, Player 1 places 1 stone of either of her colors on any empty space. From then on, starting with Player 2, the players take turns. On your turn, you must place 1 or 2 stones onto any empty spaces. If you place 2, they must be different colors. After placement, capture all fenced enemy blooms. The first player to have captured X stones wins.

I recommend new players start on a board with 4 cells per side (as shown above), and set X = 15. Once you gain experience, try a board with 5 cells per side and X = 20. You can (and maybe should) play on even larger boards with still more experience, but I’m not sure yet what X values to recommend for larger boards.

What makes it good?

It has among the simplest rules of any game, but I believe it’s deep enough to support professional play.

Nonetheless it’s approachable. New players don’t feel lost, especially on small boards. Kids enjoy it. Relatedly:

It’s balanced and interesting even on small boards like the one pictured above. That makes it easy to learn and play casually. You can play on larger boards as your comfort grows.

It’s well-suited for tournament play: it’s guaranteed to end, ties are impossible, and it has a very high branch factor (in the thousands), so players can’t rely on memorized lines of play.

You can change X to adjust the length and character of the game. Small X makes Blooms short and tactical. Large X makes it longer and strategic.

The scoring system allows handicapping: just spot one player extra points.

There are no illegal placements. I believe in avoiding forbidden actions in game design.

It looks good (to me). I’m a sucker for minimalism and color.

It’s got cool math under the hood. I won’t explain in detail, but in summary: through a novel combination of legal suicide, no passing, and prisoner scoring, Blooms emulates one of Go’s scoring systems in a much simpler way. Specifically, territory scoring with a 3-stone group tax.

Blooms in the words of others

Cody Kunka: “Blooms isn’t the first game to adopt the celebrated core of Go. You still place stones in living groups to control area on a grid. However, Blooms feels the most revolutionary and elegant to me. The 2 colors/player enable turning your opponent against himself. The small hex board improves perceptual binding and accessibility. The 12* start well balances play order without ko. Suicide ensures no placement is illegal. The score tracker kills cycles, enbles a handicap, and accentuates the tug of war.”

Ray R. – “Blooms makes me want to set fire to my collection and finally spend a lifetime mastering a game. If you remember a time when you rejected boardgames because you didn’t like Scrabble, Risk and Monopoly but then you found Catan, Azul or Gloomhaven; if you’ve been avoiding abstracts because you don’t like Chess or are intimidated by Go; if you want to be surprised by how much you’re going to like a family of games you’d previously written off, you owe it to yourself to give Blooms a shot.”

Trevor Kvaran: “Blooms feels far less overwhelming to me [than Go] and more playful. It feels like a game with a lot of depth, but that my 5 year old daughter can play and feel like she understands what she wants to do. I feel like with Blooms I have a good guess at a reasonable move, whereas in Go, I often can’t understand why a great player does what they do. That feels really good. There’s a lightness to playing Blooms that is hard to get in Go. I get the same sort of feeling playing Santorini, Hive, Slither, and Yinsh. They are deep, but don’t feel overwhelmingly heavy. Homeworlds, Go, and Zertz are games I love, but they feel very heavy to me. I struggle to have a guess at what is a good move.

Dave Dyer (owner of BoardSpace, where you can play Blooms) – “I get ‘please implement my game’ requests pretty frequently, and I always give these requests their due consideration. Most such requests end up on the slow-to-never track, but Blooms was an an exception – it went straight to the top of my list.”

A Go player on reddit: “…it’s quite an interesting game. The fact that chains of different colors can’t connect makes things often quite precarious, and even when stones looked safe to my Go intuition there were often tactics that cropped up later in the game as liberties were filled. In Go weaknesses in shape are usually places where a solid connection between two strings would be too slow, and when they are threatened you merely have to “waste” a move connecting. In Bloom these weaknesses often cannot be fixed at all, turning an early strategic error into a permanent liability. A side effect of this is that in local situations the colors you can play often have drastically different utility, leading to things like winning capturing races with fewer liberties than your opponent because you can fill their liberties with both colors but they can only use one, and making threats that force a response of a particular color so your opponent can’t use that color for something else that turn.”

A Little Golem user: “I met this game on some other forum (can’t remember where now) and started playing it with my 10 year old. She’s got a real eye for it and beats me embarrassingly often. It’s great game and I look forward to playing it with a wider pool (hopefully here).”

Luis Bolaños Mures: “Fixes the tactical bluntness of hexhex Go by adding a second piece color to each player and a second placement per turn, and addresses the ensuing cycles with a capture cutoff that doubles as the only winning condition and replicates territory scoring (minus a group tax) thanks to the absence of illegal placements. Brilliant.”



Play Blooms online (or against AI)

Board Game Arena – Board Game Arena is possibly the world’s most popular online board game platform, and you can play Blooms there. It offers three different board sizes (4 spaces on a side, 5 spaces on a side, and 6 spaces on a side), and you can choose how many stones you need to capture to win.

AiAi – You can play Blooms against a weakish AI, or online against others, using Stephen Tavener’s AiAi system. To run it, you’ll need Java and you may need to change your security preferences. You’ll get some zipped files when you download AiAi. The file to run is “ai ai.jar”. Once opened, load Blooms by going to: File –> Choose Game, then select Blooms.mgl. You can change the AI settings from the AI menu.



Print-and-Play

Here are links to printable boards (pdf) in three sizes, with scoring tracks:

When printed at full size, these boards can accommodate pieces 1.75 inches in diameter (these and these). Those pieces are large and expensive, so you may want to find smaller pieces and print the boards at smaller sizes. For example, you can print a board onto a regular sheet of paper and use M&Ms. Here’s what the board with 4 spaces per side looks like:

The World Blooms Federation (AKA me) provides the following guidelines for face-to-face play:

you should play outdoors, preferably in a garden. If it’s cold, buggy or wet outdoors, you should play in a greenhouse or winter garden.

you should play in the morning.

you should drink excellent coffee while playing.

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Tips for beginners

New players tend not to sacrifice stones enough. To win, you often need to let the opponent capture strategically placed stones. While they’re busy doing that, you can establish a strong position. Beware though: this only works when the number of stones you need to capture to win is set fairly high. When it’s low, you can’t afford to sacrifice stones as much.

Consider sacrificing one of your colors to keep the opponent from establishing a strong position, while trying to create a dominant bloom in your other color.

If some of your opponent stones are doomed but not yet captured, don’t rush to capture them. Instead attack elsewhere and only capture the doomed stones if/when you need to create more space around your blooms. This advice is doubly important when some of your opponent’s doomed stones are occupying spaces next to other opponent stones of the opposite color.

More generally, a player’s colors can interfere with each other by taking away space from each other. Try to force your opponent into positions where that happens.

When attacking, be cautious about attacking both of your opponent’s colors at once. It’s often better to focus on attacking one opponent color while containing the other.



Where did it come from?

After the painting at the top of this post inspired me to design a game, I had to decide what kind of game to make. I decided to make an abstract game because I wanted to capture the painting’s abstract beauty, and because abstract games are my favorite kind of game, by far.

I decided each player should have two colors, not only because two is the smallest increment beyond the usual one-color-per-player of abstract games, but because I thought two-colors-per-player would combine perfectly with one of the most beautiful rules in all of games: the 12* turn rule.

What’s the 12* turn rule and why is it awesome?

The 12* turn rule specifies that, at the start of a game, Player 1 takes one action, and thereafter, starting with Player 2, each player takes two actions per turn. This rule can improve a design in powerful ways:

The traditional one-action-per-turn rule can cause issues: Player 1 always ends her turn having taken one more action than Player 2. But Player 2 always ends her turn having taken the same number of actions as Player 1. This asymmetry imbalances many games, which then need other rules to compensate. The 12* rule eliminates the asymmetry, which both fixes the problem and feeds my symmetry fetish. The 12* turn rule multiplies the number of distinct ways a player can take her turn, known as branches. I like high-branch games, because, when done well, they force players to rely less on brute calculation and more on intuition. Also, high-branch games make me feel like I’m adventuring through a wide-open landscape. Low-branch games make me feel trapped in an underground maze. Owing to better balance and higher branching, the 12* turn rule often allows a game to be played on a smaller board than would otherwise be possible, making it more approachable. Now that AI is on its way to crushing humans at all games, tournament games should be designed differently. Specifically, humans shouldn’t be able to memorize sequences of play provided by AI, so tournaments don’t become memory competitions. High branching helps ensure that, and the 12* rule helps ensure high branching (indeed Blooms would turn out to have really high branching, though it doesn’t feel as high as it is).

Back to the game

Since the 12* rule gives players two actions per turn, I saw each action could be tied to a different color. Hence two colors per player.

That was the foundation. But I still had to design a game. To get a feel for what was possible, I decided to quickly design 100 not-broken games with the 12* turn rule and two colors per player.

When I sat down to make the 87th game in this series, I started thinking about how nice it would be to play a territory game (like Go) on a hex board.

I had an aesthetic reason and design reason:

aesthetic: I think hexagonal tessellations are beautiful. design: square boards have a drawback for territory games like Go: they can make it hard for new players to see what’s going on.

Why? In Go and other territory games on square boards, players must perceive which pieces are adjacent to each other, because chains of adjacent pieces are the “borders” that define territories. However, pieces on square boards can be adjacent in 2 ways: orthogonally or diagonally. But only orthogonal adjacencies “count” for purpose of defining territory. This can confuse new players, who must learn to “unsee” diagonal adjacencies.

In contrast, there’s only one kind of adjacency on hex boards, which makes it easy for new players to see adjacencies at a glance. So why isn’t Go played on a hex board? Answer: there are too many adjacencies on hex boards. On a square board each space is adjacent to 4 other spaces (remember we’re ignoring diagonal adjacencies). But on a hex board each space is adjacent to 6 other spaces. Because of that, it’s hard to capture small groups and groups tend to just grow and grow. This eliminates many of Go’s beautiful tactics.

Nick has a not bad idea

So I’m pondering this, and I realize: the hex board’s too-many-adjacencies problem would vanish if each player had two colors. Why? The extra colors would crowd each other and reduce the the effective connectivity of each, making them easier to capture. It would restore the tactics, but they would be different, reincarnated into forms alien and new.

Once I saw that, I put a game together, and I knew I had what I wanted, or thought I did. Several months on, a flaw was found: Blooms had cycles (infinitely repeating sequences of play). In contemplating them, I realized I’d been looking at the game wrong. That led to a major reformulation. THEN I was finished, and happy: it’s in contention for the best game I’ve made. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I’ve enjoyed making it

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