Summary
👥 A game for 2 – 4 players
⏳ Play time is 45 – 60 minutes
🏢 Publisher is The Op Games
Introduction
Gnome Hollow is a game in which you create a garden of mushrooms and flowers. Each piece is a hand-painted watercolor depicting the whimsical feel of gnomes and nature. The turns are simple: you place tiles in the garden and then move a gnome to perform one action during your turn. Come to Gnome Hollow and experience a peaceful garden, the thrill of competing to harvest buckets full of mushrooms and the reward of collecting all your shiny treasures!
Who will be the smartest gnome and harvest the most mushrooms at the end of the season?
Let’s get in on the table
The game will be played until one of the end game conditions are met, that’s a player has gathered their 8th flower, a player has moved their 8th Ring Marker or when the bag runs out of tiles.
Until then, you can take your turn that consists of 3 steps;
Step 1; Place 2 Garden Tiles from the tile board
Step 2; Resolve any gained mushrooms, ring marker bonuses and cascading effects
Step 3; Move a Gnome
Let’s dive a bit deeper into the 3 steps, but don’t worry! These steps are really easy and after 1 turn you exactly know what you have to do.
Step 1; Place 2 Garden Tiles from the tile board
Choose 2 tiles from the tile board and place them into the garden.
A. The tiles that you place must be adjacent to the Stump or another tile in the garden
B. White mushroom paths on the tiles must connect to other paths and green grass edges must line up to green grass edges.
C. If you tile placement extends a ring claimed by another Gnome, you must ask for permission to the other player. If they don’t agree, you can’t play it there and must place it on another place on the table. You can use both sides of the tile, just what you like as long as it’s met the conditions.
During this step, you can also place up to 2 additional tiles from your storage. At the beginning of the game, you don’t have any. But later in the game you can have 1 or 2 tiles in your storage (next to your player board).
When you have completed a ring, a ring can have any shape as long as they are reconnected. Rings can include any type of Mushroom and be made of any number of tiles. Basic rings are formed with 3 or 4 tiles and larger rings are 5 or more tiles and give you bonusses when you’ve completed a ring.
When you have a Gnome on the ring that you’ve just completed, you can collect all the mushrooms and place them next you your player board. If you don’t have a Gnome on that ring, you place the mushrooms into the center of the ring. Any player can collect them later when using a Gnome action.
Now you can move the leftmost ring marker on your player board to the column that matches the number of tiles in your ring. So when you’ve completed a ring with 5 tiles, you may place and claim one of the 4 bonusses on the space where you placed your ring marker.
Step 2; Resolve any gained mushrooms, ring marker bonuses and cascading effects
When you move a ring marker to any empty space in the reward columns 5,6 or 7+ you directly receive the bonus next to the space you choose.
You can receive these bonusses;
A signpost, place it into the ring you just created;
Select one of the available garden tiles and store it besides your player board
Take a flower token
Harvest additional mushrooms from the ring you’ve just completed
Move 1 additional ring marker
When you’ve created your second, fourth and sixth ring and move ring markers beside the Wildflower symbol, you directly receive a Wildflower tile. Place on the flower tokens on the tile into your flower collection (must be unique), stack the remaining tokens in an available flower space in the flower market above the pinwheel market. Place the tile into your storage area.
Step 3; Move a Gnome
This last step is optional, but you can use action only with your Gnome when you move them to a different location.
Select one of your two Gnomes and move it to;
1. Claim a mushroom path; move your Gnome to any unoccupied mushroom path or move your Gnome to an unclaimed ring with mushrooms to collect them.
2. Visit the Flower Market; collect a flower token, move your Gnome to the market at the top of the pinwheel market board. At this moment you can collect any one available flower token that’s not already into your collection.
3. Visit a Signpost in the garden; place your Gnome in the center of a completed ring that has a Signpost in it, directly collect the reward listed on the sign.
4. Visit the Pinwheel Market; The center of the garden is where you can visit the Pinwheel Market. This is the market where you can sell mushrooms for treasures (treasure are points at the end of the game). At the market you can sell up to 2 different sets of Mushrooms. The columns list the number of required mushrooms to make the sale, the rows shows the type of mushrooms.
When you make a sale, place a market token of the matching mushroom of the space to cover the sale you just completed. This space is no longer available to players. When all the market tokens has been used, you can only use the first column.
When you’ve completed the steps A, B and C, your turn ends and it’s the next players turn.
When you want to add more difficulty, you can try out these variants to enhance your gameplay.
The game ends
The game ends when:
– A player has gathered their 8th flower,
– A player has moved their 8th Ring Marker or
– When the bag runs out of tiles.
Finish the current round so that each player has had an equal number of turns. Once each player has completed their final turn. Each player then gets 1 last Gnome action in turn order.
Now you’re going to count up the following points;
– Flower score; this is the point value shown below the rightmost flower token.
– Ring score; this is the point value shown above the rightmost ring marker space.
– Treasure score; total the value of the treasures you have collected by selling mushrooms in the Pinwheel Market.
Conclusion & our score
Difficulty: 2.29/ 5
Re-playability: 8
Our score: 8,5 out of 10 dice
Gnome Hollow is one of the most fun games of this year! The game looks really nice from the wooden gnomes , to the mushrooms and the victory points.
When playing I was reminded of Carcassonne, this game is much more. Yes, you try to build a road, but in addition to building and closing a path, on which only one gnome is allowed to stand, you also want to earn as many mushrooms as possible and try to sell them back to the market. Closing off a path also allows you to move from your player board and write and thus receive a bonus. Also, you want to receive as many flowers as possible from which you also receive a bonus tile and can use to close a path provides x number of points at the end of the game.
In addition to looking very nice, the game components are also well thought out. The players are given a piece of magnetic component in the game board that allows you to easily move the discs, also with a magnet, on your board and also prevents them from falling off. As a result, you don’t need a dual layerd player board at all.
We really like the market part because here you can sell in each number of mushrooms only once. After this, it is no longer available, so you would have to make another choice anyway to start saving other mushrooms or then sell another number to the market. The points this gives you are really great, they all have different shapes. This was ultimately unnecessary, but fits the game tremendously well.
Gnome Hollow is very well put together, clear game rules. It’s a really fun family game and also suitable for children as young as nine to start playing this game. You will have to make some space to put everything down, but together it just looks great. As mentioned, this really is one of the most fun games of this year.
We want to thank The OP Games for this review copy and the opportunity to write about it.
