Designed by: Kevin Wilson
Predominantly a ten-minute solo puzzle, A Gentle Rain can be played with more if like-minded enthusiasts want to team up. To be enthused about the game, you’ll probably have a mind that likes a puzzle, but not one that’s so crunchy you’ll find it hard to chew.
The rules could not be much simpler: to begin, you turn over one of the randomly-shuffled tiles, and over the course of the game, you simply add more tiles, one at a time, with the caveat that each side of the tiles (showing half a flower) must match its’ neighbour: so as the surface area of the tiles grows, so do the completed flowers.
Whenever you complete four tiles in a square, you can place a flower token at their centre, but the flower must match one of the four pictured flowers around it. The moment you get the eighth and last flower down (or you run out of tiles!), the game ends, and you score a point for every flower token you placed and an additional point for every tile left over – if there are any!
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Unsurprisingly, fairly gentle. It's a game of patterns, and finding links.
A Gentle Rain can't be said to offer huge variety, as each game uses the same tiles and tokens and the only thing that changes is the order they appear in - and what you do with them! But that said, it's always a puzzle.
Sam says
I'm not entirely convinced that A Gentle Rain's self-proclaimed desire to help you relax really manifests in the playing. True, it's gentle-ish on the brain and leans into a decision space where you won't feel overwhelmed - certainly not by rules. Maybe more chilled people than myself will feel at one with puzzle, whereas I find myself moving tiles around in the air with a furrowed brow, looking for spots where they'll fit and be beneficial. Broadly speaking, I think the game hits its target, which is a not-overwhelming puzzle game that plays out in ten or so minutes. It looks lovely too, and ignore the publisher's idea that only children 8 and up will enjoy it - kids far younger than that can 'get' what's happening here. The down-side is the sense that the game to some degree seems to play itself: oftentimes decisions on tile placement are obvious, or determined by circumstance because there's literally only one place to put them - as a player, your job is sort of administrative. For that reason I find it hard to really enthuse about A Gentle Rain as a game to return to over and over, even if the first couple of plays were a quiet delight.