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solo_knightPlaythrough/Review: Knight of Flowers
What is it?
A one page (two-sided) journalling game about a gardener turned knight.
Is it playable out of the box?
Absolutely. You do need to bring your imagination, but there are prompting questions to get you started and tarot cards to guide you through the narrative. It's still a moderate effort.
Amendments:
The text calls for tarot cards, upright or reversed. I made the mistake of reversing half the deck; I should have followed the convention of reversing a third (I don’t read with reversals). I then I had to declare the reversed majors ‘setbacks, sinking moods’ rather than ‘lost battles’.
I did not want my character to go down without a fight. Or to lose the war.
Tools
One Tarot deck, some cards reversed. I recommend a third or less. You want a chance of losing, not a coin toss.
I’m happy with the rule change of ‘only minor arcana count’.
Price:
$5
Verdict
🚂 Honourably Retired - don’t think I will play this again, but who knows.
📓 Journalling Game. Prompts are a bit sparse. (You get a prompt per suit, not per card.) I didn't mind because it left more room for the story I wanted to tell.
⚰️ This can get dark. It’s easy to lose the war, and I just did not want to do that, because then I’d have had to keep playing until I’ve found a satisfactory resolution to the story.
This is one of those games where I’m happy to have played it, but I cannot recommend buying it because it falls into this weird space where there’s not enough substance to warrant paying real money. It’s neither innovative nor detailed enough. (At some point, I will acquire Diana: Warrior Princess, which is not a solo game, but sounds completely bonkers. I would not have come up with that, but while I would not have come up with the setup for this game either, it’s well within the range of ‘here’s the frame for a story’ that I could have come up with.
This is not to say that zero work went into this, and I’m a bit conflicted to put a price on how much work went into a thought and its execution.
In the end, my funds are limited, and I tend not to buy games unless they
– have a high replay value
– can be used as a resource for other games
– are something I would not have come up with in a million years and I want to honour that, whether that’s a setting, an idea, or a mechanism.
While I want to fall in love with the games I play, it’s hard to fall in love with a perfectly decent, perfectly fun, but also perfectly unremarkable game where you have to bring most of the story.
I didn’t find it too difficult to come up with characters and events – there was enough guidance to make this into a game – but the ideas I brought came out of my own brain and I feel I could have used a dozen other quest starters with a similar mechanic.
So that’s not a thumbs down at all, and this is definitely a game, I just start feeling a little jaded by the genre, I suppose.
What is it?
A one page (two-sided) journalling game about a gardener turned knight.
Is it playable out of the box?
Absolutely. You do need to bring your imagination, but there are prompting questions to get you started and tarot cards to guide you through the narrative. It's still a moderate effort.
Amendments:
The text calls for tarot cards, upright or reversed. I made the mistake of reversing half the deck; I should have followed the convention of reversing a third (I don’t read with reversals). I then I had to declare the reversed majors ‘setbacks, sinking moods’ rather than ‘lost battles’.
I did not want my character to go down without a fight. Or to lose the war.
Tools
One Tarot deck, some cards reversed. I recommend a third or less. You want a chance of losing, not a coin toss.
I’m happy with the rule change of ‘only minor arcana count’.
Price:
$5
Verdict
🚂 Honourably Retired - don’t think I will play this again, but who knows.
📓 Journalling Game. Prompts are a bit sparse. (You get a prompt per suit, not per card.) I didn't mind because it left more room for the story I wanted to tell.
⚰️ This can get dark. It’s easy to lose the war, and I just did not want to do that, because then I’d have had to keep playing until I’ve found a satisfactory resolution to the story.
This is one of those games where I’m happy to have played it, but I cannot recommend buying it because it falls into this weird space where there’s not enough substance to warrant paying real money. It’s neither innovative nor detailed enough. (At some point, I will acquire Diana: Warrior Princess, which is not a solo game, but sounds completely bonkers. I would not have come up with that, but while I would not have come up with the setup for this game either, it’s well within the range of ‘here’s the frame for a story’ that I could have come up with.
This is not to say that zero work went into this, and I’m a bit conflicted to put a price on how much work went into a thought and its execution.
In the end, my funds are limited, and I tend not to buy games unless they
– have a high replay value
– can be used as a resource for other games
– are something I would not have come up with in a million years and I want to honour that, whether that’s a setting, an idea, or a mechanism.
While I want to fall in love with the games I play, it’s hard to fall in love with a perfectly decent, perfectly fun, but also perfectly unremarkable game where you have to bring most of the story.
I didn’t find it too difficult to come up with characters and events – there was enough guidance to make this into a game – but the ideas I brought came out of my own brain and I feel I could have used a dozen other quest starters with a similar mechanic.
So that’s not a thumbs down at all, and this is definitely a game, I just start feeling a little jaded by the genre, I suppose.
