Sow Review
Sow was kindly sent to us for review by Chris Handy and Perplext as part of their most recent Pack O Games. For our thoughts on the rest of the series, check out our overview article!
I’m not a natural gardener. My fingers are as far from green as is possible to get, as the plethora of dead and dying plants outside my window are a testament to. I was at a loss as to what to do. But thanks to Sow, I’ve learnt the error of my ways! Today, I’m pleased to share with you the secrets of successful horticulture.
Picture your garden. I expect it probably looks something similar to the above, a big ring of different beds and pots ready to bloom into life. Growing flowers starts with seeds, and seeds come in one of 4 colours: white, blue, red and yellow. This valuable graphic design lets you know what colour petals your flower will be. Honestly, I’d have studied botany if I’d known there are only 4 different types of flower!
Getting the seeds to bloom is, however, somewhat challenging and rather counter intuitive. You see they won’t do anything by themselves (a false assumption on my part, though quite obvious when you think of all those packets of sunflower seeds I have in my kitchen cupboard). You should pick up all the seeds from one plot, then move them around the garden, dropping one packet off into each plot as you go, until finally you place the last packet and lo! Beautiful flowers shall bloom from that packet, and any packets already in the plot whose colours match the packet you placed. It’s truly amazing how nature resembles the mancala mechanic familiar to those who have played Five Tribes or Trajan… or mancala.
And so, you and your fellow gardeners shall continue, creating life upon the table top. Not particularly exciting looking life mind you but still this is a miracle before your eyes! Of course, at some point you’ll think it might be nice to do something with these flowers. Perhaps make a bouquet to impress your significant other. What colour do they like again? Maybe check under your wheelbarrow where you left a note for yourself. Perhaps if you collect enough you’ll have the happiest significant other in the neighbourhood.
As you’ll know if you’ve ever tried to remove a flower, you can’t just pull them out willy-nilly. No! It takes careful planning and management. You’ll continue mancala-ring (definitely a word) your flowers around the garden aiming to land the last flower into your wheelbarrow so that you might collect it. When you succeed you need only call out a colour on that flower and all the other flowers will hope out of the ground and into your bouquet. If only I’d known how straight forward gardening was I’d have made more of an effort earlier.
An interesting historical aside, the benefits of utilising multiple beds to aid growth has been long known about. Have you ever seen a country house with only one flower bed? Or a successful farmer with a single field? I think not. This discovery also gave rise to the very British phenomenon of the allotment.
Something I have only alluded to thus far is that Sow has you working on a shared garden with between 2 and 4 people, and they all want to get flowers! And since everyone gets two plots beside their wheelbarrow, 4 people will tend to take up most of the garden. The issue here is that whoever drops a flower into a wheelbarrow space must still trigger the migration of flowers into that player’s bouquet. With 4 or even just 3 players, the space is so tight that this is all but impossible to avoid. When doing this you have the choice of what colour to pick, encouraging you to puzzle out which player is after which colour, yet this is ultimately dissatisfying when you compare it to the two player game.
At two players 8 of the 12 spaces are neutral. Flowers can land there last and remain in play, ready to be moved again later. With this, there is huge scope for out manoeuvring your opponent, blocking them from getting flowers into their wheelbarrow at every turn while fighting tooth and nail for a good drop into your own. It turns your allotment into a squabble akin to an episode of One Foot in the Grave (which, for our American audience, is a very good thing). But as soon as another player is added your room for blocking will inevitably see you swapping points for one player to maybe slightly fewer points for a different player. And that just isn’t as enjoyable or interesting to me.
All the games in the Pack O Game series are intended to be quick playing, so I can see a constant flow of flowers into players’ bouquets as an intentional decision to keep it from becoming impossible to ever score. But fun and amusement is not present naturally within the mechanisms, theme or art as it so clearly is in Gym or Rum where the humour helps offset any random or uncontrollable elements. Sow is as dry in mechanics and artwork as the dirt in which it is set, a quality that is perfectly fine for a purely strategic battle of wits (just look at chess). With two players the game succeeds magnificently, but with more it falls flat.
I have not even discussed the two special action cards, one featuring a windmill that will change the direction of the mancala, or a goffer/watering can that, depending on its orientation, lets you gobble up an entire plots worth of flowers or to immediately pick a flower from your wheel barrow without needing to mancala into it. These are interesting elements within the two player game, little nuggets of extra opportunity that are activated when the two end in the same row as each other. They must be carefully considered… in the two player game! At higher player counts the system again fails as I’ve never seen the two cards meet, and the possibility of ever setting yourself up for using them, 3 or more player turns down the line, is beyond the realms of hope.
Sow is far from a bad game. Indeed, at 2 player it is a fantastic challenge, a really deep tussle to get involved in with more passive-aggressive blocking than a student protest in the UK. But it falls woefully short of this high mark with more players.
Rating: Sow Sow*
*unless it’s 2 player…
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