Flow was one of the surprise box office hits at the beginning of the year. At the Oscars, it beat out titles like Inside Out 2 and secured the coveted trophy for Best Animated Feature. Now, a board game adaptation of the film is also coming from Latvia. Asmodee takes over distribution in Germany.
I tested whether the game can compare to the film.
In the film, the nameless cat is caught in a flood and must escape to a passing boat. There, she encounters various other animals—including a dog, a capybara, and a monkey. In the board game Flow This is exactly what it's all about. The four animals must work together to rescue them from the floodwaters and get from the four corners of the game board to the central boat.
Draw, play, draw, play and sometimes roll the dice
To allow the animals to reach the boat, players play tiles with path sections. Standard rules apply when placing tiles, such as the tiles must be adjacent to at least one existing tile, new tiles must be connected to one of the animals, and no dead ends must occur. The tile to be placed is drawn from a face-down display. If you don't want to play it, you can discard it and take a face-down action card. If you don't want to draw a tile at all, you can play one of the action cards from your hand for its effect.
These turns continue in turn until the one-minute timer runs out. Then you roll two dice. These determine which row and column tiles will be removed by the "Great Wave." These tiles go into an open discard area.
The game ends successfully when all animals are connected to the boat. If this is not successful and all tiles and hand cards have been played, the group loses the game.
For a greater challenge, 1 to 6 scenario cards can be used, which slightly change the rules.
Information about Flow
| Number of people: 1 to 6 people Age: from 8 years Playing time: 15 minutes Difficulty: Family game Long-term motivation: poor Mechanics: Tile placement, real-time game Game idea: Dmitrijus Babičius, Tadas Kastanauskas, Marijus Lapinskas, Justina Lapinskienė Illustrations: Reinis Pētersons Publisher: Brain Games; German edition: Asmodee Official Website: Flow Year of publication: 2025 Language: German Cost: 28 Euro |
Conclusion
As a film, Flow absolutely won me over. Visually impressive, calm, thoughtful, and simply very unique. I was accordingly excited about the board game adaptation, even though the already familiar real-time aspect surprised me a bit, as it didn't really fit the feel of the film.
Visually, the game also does everything right (even if it didn't have to do much to achieve this). Except for the tiles, the components depict scenes and artwork from the film, which is simply beautiful to look at in the board game. But unfortunately, that's where the good things I can say about the game end.
The die-cut sheets and tiles are of mediocre quality, and the way the tiles are still attached to the sheets makes it difficult to remove them without damaging them. The board and cards also feel simply cheap. Considering the price, you'd expect better (for comparison, Captain Flip, with more content, is about 20% cheaper and of better quality).
That wouldn't be so bad if the game itself were good. But here, any sense of the film is lost. The real-time aspect was a terrible idea.
In terms of gameplay mechanics, the game is very low-level. It offers only the bare minimum to truly qualify as a "finished" game. Everything seems rushed, thrown together quickly in order to capitalize on the film's success as early as possible.
Especially with a small number of players, the game is often won after just two or three rounds. The wave is completely arbitrary due to the dice roll and feels like a forced extension of the game, since simply placing tiles would otherwise have been over too quickly.
The scenarios do make the game a bit more challenging, with four to six scenarios, but they still don't offer a truly varied gameplay experience. The core mechanics of placing tiles and rolling dice are simply too weak for that.
Perhaps the game could work reasonably well if the group consists primarily of children and it represents an introduction to cooperative or real-time games for them. But the cooperative aspect is actually too weak for that, too, since no one knows which tile will be available on the next turn, and the timer is too short for extended discussions.
Overall, Flow just like a game thrown together quickly and cheaply under time pressure, that can't convincingly bring anything from the film to the board game table.
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