Sep 2024: The Flowers of Primrows
Primrows isn’t a match-three. In fact, some of our playtesters described it as “the opposite of a match-three.” But let’s be honest with ourselves: to someone window-shopping through the Steam Store, the game looks like it might be a match-three at a glance. Colorful shapes on a grid? Seems to fit the pattern, right? Because of this surface-level similarity, we wanted to make sure that this game would appeal to the kind of audience that loves that sort of game.
To explain how we approached this challenge, let me first introduce the stars of Primrows: the flowers!
Sometimes they’re happy, sometimes they’re sleepy, sometimes they’re a little bit startled. These emotions aren’t just there to liven up the mood, they convey important hints to the player!
When you first plant a garden, every flower will either be happy or sleepy. Happy flowers score, sleepy flowers don’t.
The emotion in between the two — the ‘perked up’ state — provides key feedback during the next step.
Once you’ve grown your garden, you get two chances to prune your garden to grow more happy flowers. Even though the rules are simple to explain — flowers are happy when they are one-of-a-kind in their row, column, and quadrant — they take time for new players to really get used to.
Without the surprised emotion, this is what the board would look like after a bit of pruning.
It’s harder to tell whether or not your decisions were good until they’re already locked in, and it’s too late to make any changes. What’s more, since flowers are chosen at random whenever they grow, you aren’t necessarily guaranteed a reward just because you made a smart move.
In this state, Primrows would play with the pacing of a board game. This would be fine for a board game, but the sort of players drawn to games made up of a grid of colorful shapes typically come to the table expecting more immediate feedback.
To provide this feedback, we introduced the middle-ground ‘perked up’ expression. These are the flowers that might be happy the next time you grow flowers, depending on the roll of the dice. It highlights exactly what you’re risking, and what you stand to gain.
With the ‘perked up’ state, now you know at a glance that the purple flower in the left is ‘safe,’ all three of the blue flowers have woken up and might score once new flowers grow in the empty spaces, and none of the light cyan flowers have any potential to score. Also, the happy yellow and pink flowers’ are at risk.
Importantly, you get all of this feedback before you’ve locked in your decisions by watering the garden again to make new flowers grow. If you want to take a less risky or more aggressive strategy, you’ve got time to prune and unprune.