Butterfly Garden

Butterfly Garden is a gorgeous hexagonal tile placing game.  I grabbed it because it reminded me a bit of Tsuro, but with a nature theme.  The game designed was Reiner Knizia, a name that saounded familiar ... I turns out he also created Botswana, which we reviewed recently.

Among hexagonal tile placement path-building games, for simplicity Tsuro would win every time.  But there is alot of room fr variety.  In Butterfly Garden, the players have sections at the edge of the board marked as their "flower beds", and there are six fountain tiles around the edges that each start with one blue butterfly, and one tile in the middle where the remaining six butterflies start with the purple one flying last.

As you place tiles, you try to guide butterflies to you own flower bed, then score them by placing them behind your player screen.  The blue butterflies count as one point each, pink scores two and the solos purpler butterfly scores 3.

After the first few moves, the number of choices increases dramatically.  Sometimes you can clearly get one flyer closer to your bed, launch a new butterfly from one of their home tiles, or thwart the other player's chosen paths.  In our third game, there were two butterflies headed for Anne's bed, but I had a tile that would crash them into each other and take them out of the game entirely.

Example of the choices: On this shot, it looks like the blue butterfly is definitely going to go to the red bed, but it's blue's turn and the butterfly could get redirected down the long path to the blue bed instead.
 
A few minor issues for us: 

1) As the board fills up, it can be hard playing new tiles without bumping a lot of existing tiles or knocking over the butterflies.  I had to help with the shaky hands, but that's no problem, I just kept making the minor adjustments.

2) There was no way to fit the six butterflies on that central tile, so we ended up lining them up on the sidelines with the purple one last.  So when a tile was placed that would launch a butterfly we then put the next butterfly on the central tile, ready to move out next time.  They ran like clockwork that way.

We had a lot of fun with this.  Of the three games we played, I won by one, she won by one, and the third game was tied at 8 after I crashed the other two flyers.  

This is a keeper.  Colorful and quiet, with all those paths swirling around and under each other.  Nice.