Wouter & Ymke 
In Bloom Kingdom, everyone is helping to fill the same royal court with kings, queens, knights, nobles, farmers, wizards, dragons, unicorns, fortune tellers and jesters. Except these aren’t exactly your usual medieval characters. Flowers have found their way into pretty much everything, from armour to royal clothing, and the result is a kingdom that looks like someone left the castle gates open during gardening season.
We’re all building that kingdom together, but we’re definitely not working towards the same goal. Most of the cards in your hand will eventually end up in the shared display, while only two stay with you for scoring. So which characters are you willing to give away, and which ones are you hoping everyone else will make valuable for you? With everyone adding cards at the same time, the kingdom you had in mind isn’t always the kingdom you end up with.
👥 2-5 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 20 minutes
📝 Designers: Christian Kudahl & Thomas Weber
🎨 Artwork: Cuculum
🏢 Publisher: White Goblin Games (Review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Bloom Kingdom is played over three rounds. At the beginning of a round, everyone receives a hand of six character cards. Each turn, all players choose one card from their hand, place it face down and then reveal simultaneously. Those cards are added to a shared display in the middle of the table, with each character getting its own column. Jesters are the exception, as they join one of the existing columns instead.
Some cards have an initiative number, which determines when they enter the display. Cards without a number are added first, followed by numbered cards from lowest to highest. This matters because half of the cards have an instant effect that happens as soon as they’re added.
Those effects can change the display in several ways. A unicorn lets you draw a card from the deck before removing one card from your hand. Knights can remove dragons, while wizards can remove any card from the display. Jesters are placed into another character’s column and count as that character. Fortune tellers do something different again, letting you secretly look at one random card from another player’s hand.
You keep playing until everyone has only two cards left. Those aren’t played at all. Instead, they become your scoring cards for the round. Each character looks at the shared display differently. A dragon, for example, gives you 4 points for every dragon currently there. Queens score queen and king pairs, while knights want complete groups of a knight, queen and unicorn.
Other characters come with conditions. Farmers only score if there are at least as many farmers as knights. Nobles need at least as many farmers as nobles, while unicorns need their column to be at least as large as every other column. Fortune tellers score both fortune tellers and dragons. Kings and jesters are slightly different because they also care about the cards other players kept. A king scores as long as nobody else kept a jester, while a jester needs somebody else to have kept a king.
Once everyone has scored their two cards, those cards are removed and new hands are dealt. Everything already played into the kingdom stays exactly where it is, so the display continues growing from one round to the next. After three rounds, you add up your points and whoever has the highest total wins.
Artwork & Components
Bloom Kingdom is entirely made up of cards. There are 100 character cards, ten of each character, along with ten reference cards explaining their effects and scoring. Every character mixes a medieval role with some kind of plant or flower. The knight has a blue rose growing through the armour, the farmer appears to have replaced their head with a large orange flower, and the king looks like royalty got involved in a particularly ambitious gardening project. It’s strange, but I like it. The stone arches around the characters also give the cards a similar structure without making all ten characters look alike.
The artwork doesn’t get in the way once the cards are on the table either. Character symbols are large and repeated in the corners, while effects and scoring information sit along the bottom. Initiative numbers are shown separately above the characters. Several cards can overlap in their columns while still leaving the important information visible.
The reference cards certainly earned their place in the box during our first games. We weren’t immediately remembering whether a farmer cared about knights or a noble about farmers, and there are enough little symbols that we regularly checked them.
Our Experience
Our first round was fairly straightforward. We picked two cards that looked promising and started putting the rest into the kingdom. A few turns later, someone played another queen and we were quite happy about it. Then we played one ourselves and somebody else looked even happier.
Right. Of course.
That was probably when we started paying more attention to what we were putting into the kingdom, rather than only thinking about the two cards we wanted to keep. It happened several times after that. Someone would add exactly the character we needed without knowing it, and a few turns later we’d return the favour without meaning to. There wasn’t much direct attacking going on, but we still spent plenty of time watching what everyone else played.
We weren’t particularly good at figuring out what everyone had kept either. Someone would look suspiciously pleased about another dragon appearing and we’d immediately decide they must have one. Usually they didn’t. Or they did, but then kept something else anyway. The fortune teller gives you a little information, but not enough to suddenly turn you into Sherlock Holmes. After a while, we mostly stopped trying. Keeping our own options open proved considerably more useful than trying to solve everybody else’s hand.
The unicorn taught us something else. We had one that looked excellent. Several unicorns were already there, the column was keeping up nicely and we were feeling rather confident about it. Then another column became larger on one of the final turns.
Zero points.
After that, dragons started looking strangely attractive. Not because they’re particularly exciting, but because you can look at the display and have a reasonably good idea what they’re worth. We still kept risky cards, of course. We just stopped keeping two of them quite so enthusiastically. Kings produced a few similar moments, especially when we were absolutely certain nobody else had kept a jester. Our success rate on those predictions is probably best left unrecorded.
The three rounds felt quite different as well. During the first, the kingdom is still mostly empty and we were largely establishing what would be there later. By round two, cards from the first round were already affecting what we wanted to keep. The third had far more connections to consider simply because so much was sitting on the table. Scores tended to grow along with the kingdom too, without the game suddenly deciding that later rounds were worth double points. Being behind after the first didn’t feel particularly worrying when there was still so much left to score.
We preferred having more people involved. With two, it was easier to follow where things might be heading and our guesses were considerably less terrible. Three suited us better, and four was probably our favourite count. More cards appeared every turn, but because everyone chooses simultaneously, adding another player didn’t leave us waiting through a long sequence of individual turns.
Our Thoughts
What I keep coming back to with Bloom Kingdom is the fact that the kingdom belongs to everyone. You put down a farmer because you need one, somebody else adds another, and suddenly the player holding a noble is having a much better round than either of you intended. Dragons can help someone holding a dragon and somebody else with a fortune teller. A queen you wanted can make another player’s king-related plans rather attractive too. Even when nobody is deliberately targeting you, their cards keep interfering with what you hoped would happen.
I like that. We’re watching what everyone plays rather than disappearing into our own hands, and helping another player isn’t necessarily a mistake. Sometimes you need that extra character enough that giving somebody else a few points is still worth it. Other times we held something back because the person sitting opposite us had been looking far too pleased with that particular column. Whether they actually needed it was another matter.
There’s a fair amount you simply can’t control, though. Sometimes you know you’re gambling. Keeping a unicorn when its column is only one card ahead isn’t exactly a safe investment. Fair enough. What bothered us more were the occasions where the final play changed a condition and there was simply nothing left to do about it. A card we’d kept for most of the round could go from a good score to zero at the last moment. That didn’t happen constantly, but when it did, the earlier turns could feel less important than that final reveal.
You’re also always playing with the same ten characters. There aren’t new decks to discover or different player powers changing how each game begins. I don’t think that’s a problem at this size, because the state of the kingdom changes which cards we’re interested in. After a handful of games, I don’t feel we’ve seen every situation those characters can produce, but I also wouldn’t expect completely new strategies to keep appearing forever.
The iconography also takes a little longer to remember than the basic turn structure suggests, but that became less of an issue after a few games. What stayed was the uncertainty around those final scoring cards. Sometimes it worked in our favour, sometimes it didn’t, and occasionally the last reveal had a little too much say in the result. Still, we spent plenty of time looking around the table, questioning what somebody had kept and finding out that our confident assumptions were completely wrong. Those are the parts of Bloom Kingdom that stuck with us afterwards, and I’m quite happy to return to the flower-covered kingdom and make a few more bad assumptions.
📝 We received a copy of Bloom Kingdom from White Goblin Games.
