Petrichor Game

Very fun game! We enjoy it alot. Replayability is high.

Despite what one reviewer wrote, it's not difficult to learn. Any game of this level requires the ability to read some detailed instructions and maybe even watch a video. I have hundreds of such games and they take a bit of patience. So, if you have the attention span of a gnat, skip this game. It's not for you. If learning games that take less than 5 minutes is your style, grab a crappy game from your local grocery store, enjoy a light beer, and have a good night.

In Petrichor, you manipulate the weather in order to score points. You do this by playing action cards for frost, sun, wind, and rain. Respectively, these allow you to add a cloud with a raindrop above a field, add raindrops to a cloud, move a cloud, or move a raindrop from clouds to the fields below. Taking any of these actions allows you to vote for the upcoming weather phase, or to manipulate one of three dice toward its harvest icon.The weather phase produces effects that are similar to (but more dramatic than) the action-cards, but only the two types that received the most votes will occur, and top backers will receive a boost for endgame points. Following the weather, if all three dice show the harvest icon, players with raindrops on field-tiles with developed plants will score various amounts of points based on the types of plants.Forget about the fact that each player's raindrops are colored glass stones. Petrichor is a fairly abstract area-control game, and while you can choose to really mess with other players, the game flow and the presentation are meant to be calming, like the scent of rain after a dry spell. These aspects are reminiscent of Tokaido, and it achieves them capably, if not elegantly. It's easy to forget to vote, for example, or that plants have minimum requirements to develop prior to a harvest. Occasionally it requires nimble fingers to remove vote tokens without bumping the score markers, but these are minor grievances toward a game that pretty consistently engages everyone for about 20 minutes per player.It's not a social game, but it is tactical, requiring decisions in the moment based on the actions of other players, and strategic in choosing whether to ditch your cards and go first, or save specific cards in anticipation of weather likely to hit in the next round. The same player never goes first on consecutive rounds, but it doesn't simply pass to the next player either. It's a great mechanic, and I'm certain other game designs will use it in the future. Recommended for people who want a highly-competitive, lower-intensity experience for 2 to 4 players with a solitaire variant.

Confusing, hard to learn.

Petrichor is...a strange game. On the one hand, it's a beautiful game. On the other, the gameplay is really convoluted. On the other hand...it's a BEAUTIFUL game.So you perform these actions to create clouds, make them grow, move them around, and make it rain. You use weather and clouds to make crops grow. You harvest the crops to get victory points. Clear enough? But then, often you HAVE to do certain actions, and so you're moving stuff around pointlessly, or sabotaging one investment to hopefully have payoff in another or sabotage another player. Is this "relaxing"??? HECK NO!!! It's aggravating! Headache inducing! And yet...Oh that artwork! It makes one think of games that actually ARE relaxing, like Tokaido. The components are lovely. Growing crops is just a pleasant feeling... Argh!!!! And then you're flipping back and forth through the rule book trying to figure out what the heck you do under this specific circumstance or other... Oy!!!The lid on the teakettle that brews the tempest (to stretch an illustration) is that all that stuff is NOT HOW YOU WIN. In actuality you get points for winning votes. Not for voting. Not for getting an action that helps you. FOR WINNING VOTES. So playing this game with my wife I won by a landslide because I was doing not what would help me the most but just what would allow me to win votes every time. That has got to be one of the weirdest/stupidest/most non-thematic mechanisms I've ever seen in a game. And yet...that's the only mechanic that was actually FUN.My wife enjoyed this experience, though she also found it frustrating (?). Overall I would say try this game at your local public library. Barring that, buy it on sale. It's worth $25 for the production quality alone. The actual game is not worth the $45 it retails for. It's just not that good of a game.

Es un juego genial, cuya idea no es solo atractiva sino que se logro implementar de gran manera con la mecánica del juego, que no solo lo hace divertido sino también desafiante y visualmente agradable.

Chulo y de precio muy bien.

A stunningly elegant game that is fairly simple to get to grips with and has wonderfully fluid gameplay that can flow in countless directions, but always makes sense. It’s one of those special games that’s even a joy to look at and watch being played by others. A work of genius!

Me han gustado los componentes y que el tema está bien implementado con la mecánica. Lo único que no me gusta o no entiendo es lo que quiere decir el autor con el sistema de votaciones para el pronóstico del tiempo.La razón de comprar el juego es porque el tema es original y se aleja de conflictos bélicos, económicos y políticos.Es un juego para jugones de corte familiar y se queda corto para jugones con el "culo pelao".