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1. Shuffle the 28 lake tiles and place them face down.
2. Place a tile on the table. Each tile has four differently-colored half lilies, with eight colors being used in the entire game.
3. Draw a tile and place it adjacent to the previous tile so that the touching sides create a completed lily. If no edge matches, remove the tile from the game.
4. Keep drawing and placing (or discarding) tiles. If you place a tile so that you have four tiles in a square, then you can fill the hole created by the tiles with a blossom token that matches one of the lilies surrounding this hole.
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Like this!
5. If you place all eight blossom tokens before you have to draw a tile and can't, then your score is 8 + the number of unplaced tiles remaining in the stack. If you don't, your score is the number of blossoms you placed.
Got it on the final tile for a score of 8!
That's it!
A Gentle Rain differs from almost everything else in Wilson's published catalog — and that's kind of the point. As Wilson tweeted in May 2021:
I don't want to constantly rehash one or two designs in various iterations. My earliest inspiration as a designer came from Sid Sackson, who was all over the place in the kind of games he designed. While you could see his "voice" running through, he messed with _everything_!
— Kevin Wilson (@KevinWilson42) May 22, 2021
In fact, A Gentle Rain began as a print-and-play design that Wilson made available to various people in December 2013 as a holiday present. (Wilson has released several other designs this way over the years.) Here's an excerpt from that original PDF:
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As you can see, the chill approach present in the published version of the game was in place from the get-go, with Wilson pitching a meditative approach to playing the design, with your attention — your presence at the table — being far more important than whatever your score might happen to be.
My wife Linda and I took the same approach for a game event that we ran in mid-June 2021 (for vaccinated attendees) in which we had four copies of A Gentle Rain on hand, with 3-4 people playing at each table. We brewed tea in individual teapots that folks could bring home with them as a souvenir, and we served homemade lemon-lime cookies that are the most delectable I've ever had.
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The image from our Meetup invite
We swapped tables every game or two, and some of us broke off to chat and eat and drink between games, and the whole thing was a delightful event that ended with us giving away three of the four copies.
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I've now played A Gentle Rain eight times on a review copy from Mondo Games, both solo and with others, and the design is a small delight. I can't point to anything new or innovative in the design regarding how it plays, but the sensibility of how to play is novel, and it comes across almost automatically when playing, mostly because the design is so minimal. You place a tile — possibly in a good spot, but possibly not because who knows what's coming next — then you place another and ideally it all comes together.
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Ideal for small spaces
The only drawback to the publication — one that Wilson expects to be corrected in the next printing of the game — is that the blossom tokens are slightly too large for the holes created by the tiles, which means the blossoms sit on the tiles or push them slightly apart instead of nestling in as you would hope.
For more thoughts on the game and to see how well I play when filming at the same time, check out this overview video:
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