Designed by: Sara Perry
Gift of Tulips is a curious set-collection game for 2-6 players. Each player is striving to make their tulips the most valuable, but you’re not just claiming flowers for yourself – you may be gifting them to other people…
The cards are made up of four different-coloured tulips, each with a number value of 2/3/4. Everyone begins with a couple of tulip cards in front of them, and on your turn you draw two more: one at at time. With each card, you have four options (sort of; you can’t take the same option twice on the same turn): you can add it to your own collections (increasing your potential score at the end of the game); you can add it to a growing collection of tulips in the middle of the table (-these determine which sets will be worth the most points); you can place it in the ‘secret’ set which will be revealed at game-end, or you can gift it to an opponent, gaining immediate points for doing so depending on how valuable that colour tulip currently is.
It feels like the most sensible thing to do to is keep adding cards to your own sets, or manipulating the shared sets. But gifting cards can score quite a lot of points, especially if you give away the currently-most-valuable tulips. Ideally, you want to give them away while they’re worth points, then devalue them before the game ends. When it does end, the secret set if shuffled then the top five cards only are added to the central, value-defining sets. Players score points for having the most in each of the top three colours of tulip (the fourth-best scores nothing!) and the player with the most points wins the game.
For a game that involves gifting, there's certainly a low-level edge to it as the worth of your sets fluctuate according to what's happening around the table.
Low to moderate. Although the tulips themselves are really immaterial - it could have been anything - decisions are meaningful without being overwhelming.
You've two cards and four choices (or three choices, with the second card!) So it seems simple, but Gift of Tulips has a level of opacity to proceedings that, whilst at first sight seems obstructive, in the longer-term keeps it interesting.
Simple rules but ever-changing game states make Gift of Tulips consistently intriguing, if not compelling.
2-6
Players
8+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
While the term 'set collection' doesn't exactly get my heart racing, Gift of Tulips presents a deft, quirky puzzle, where player input matters more than luck, and I rather like its weirdness. Like Mandala or Hats, the theme is really irrelevant once you start playing, but similarly Gift of Tulips really leans on the players to make it what it is: if you want theme and story, it won't scratch those itches. But if you want absorbing, tactical chicanery with a side-helping of hate-gifting, this is a decent offering. My only caveat really is the alleged up-to-6 players feels optimistic: mechanically it'll function, but it's a more interesting engagement with two or three.