In 2022, Dr. Finn Prescribes Flowers, Farmers, Fisheries, and the Feds

In September 2020, designer Steve Finn of Dr. Finn's Games Kickstarted four titles at once — Biblios: Quill and Parchment, Mining Colony, Nanga Parbat, and The Butterfly Garden — allowing backers to choose what they wanted or to grab his entire 2021 line-up in one go and have everything shipped at once. Says Finn, "For my small independent company, this makes international freight, which is now getting out of control., much more reasonable."

With those four titles now available at retailers, Finn is preparing to launch his 2022 line-up on Kickstarter before the end of August 2021, and he's once again pitching four standalone games — along with four separate and related games, about which I'll say more in a moment. For now, here are brief takes on the first quartet:

• Alpujarras is a turn-based game in which 2-4 players move their mules around an action track outside the game board. Whoever is furthest behind takes the turn and moves their mule to an action space to perform an action, such as placing a farmer, moving a farmer, or expanding an irrigation channel. By performing these different actions, you can grow fruit, which are delivered to the towns, where they are sold for dinars.

• Each turn in The Feds, inspired by Finn's 2013 title Gunrunners, you reveal gang activity; place one of your federal agents to surveil an area, which forces another player's agent into the field at that location, then move a police car on a rondel to acquire a special ability for later use or make an arrest. When enough agents are placed at different locations, they bust the crooks and players make arrests and confiscate contraband based on the strength of their agents. After four busts, the player with the most points wins.

• Over six rounds in Fisheries of Gloucester, two players have a set number of hours to take actions, such as charting the course (i.e., placing polyomino ocean tiles), sailing your boats, and catching fish. Players earn points by catching different varieties of fish and by finishing the game on one of the islands in the ocean.

• In The Little Flower Shop Dice Game, based on 2018's The Little Flower Shop, 1-4 players roll five dice at the start of each of the six rounds, taking turns based on their initiative die to lock and re-roll dice to claim "arrangement" tiles that match their die results. You "arrange" these tiles in a display on your player board, while also trying to complete that game's specific task, one of six included in the box.

Aside from those titles, Finn plans to release a quartet of "express" games: two-player games that use at most forty cards and that are based on his 2022 releases. As such, the games in question are:

• Alpujarras Express
• The Feds Express
• Fisheries of Gloucester Express
• The Little Flower Shop Express

I asked Finn how these games came to be, and the short answer is shipping logistics and Kickstarter expectations. "The Express Games Series started when I was thinking of interesting stretch goals for my campaign", says Finn. He usually has small promo packs for each title as a bonus for Kickstarter backers, but otherwise the games are complete at the start of the crowdfunding campaign with no elements being added based on funding.

He goes on, "Given the expectations of Kickstarter, though, I had to come up with stretch goal ideas, so the idea of making a two-player card game based on a game's theme came to me. I tried it with Fisheries of Gloucester and was happy with the result. This led me to see if I could do it with the other three games."

Problem was...Finn succeeded, giving him too much of a good thing. With four express games, how would it be possible to easily and affordably package them and allow people to get specific ones? "Thus, it became its own separate item", he says, but then "I wasn't sure how to incorporate these into a stretch goal since, as a single product, it was too expensive to give to everyone who backed just one game."

His solution? Design even more games, with Decoratifs and Illuminare being two-player-only abstract mini-games not related to any others in the 2022 line-up. Says Finn, "These will be stretch goals for each backer, assuming the two stretch goals are met. Because of their size, I can send them in a first-class standard envelope by USPS, so I do not have to have a 'Kickstarter' version and 'retail' version of each game. When making four games at once, it was getting too complicated to have different boxes for different versions, so now all the promo packs and stretch goals for Kickstarter backers will be mailed separately."