20 April 2025
|
Looking for a strategic family game? Gnome Hollow could be just that board game. Thematic and fun, this is one we recommend.
Written by Emma Garrett
The rulebook for this game is a work of art. Once you pull yourself away from reading about it, the whole experience is a slice of cosy brilliance. Meet Holly, Poppy and their friends, the native gnomes of the forest. They spend their days building circles of colourful mushrooms, collecting flowers of all shades, and hoarding various shining treasures they find.
Let me tell you about the rulebook and just how impressive it is. The creator has beautifully melded clear instructions with thematic context in the form of apparently handwritten notes from someone who discovered and documented the world of the gnomes. Illustrations are all glorious watercolour, scrapbook paintings. Everything about it is engaging, and enchanting, yet at the same time if you’re in a rush to learn how to play, it’s clear what you can skip and explains things well. The design and artwork are exceptional. It feels like a trip into another time and another world.
Related article: Best family board games.
Playing Gnome Hollow
The game itself is a gentle mix of two intertwining halves. For starters, you’ll be open drafting hexagonal tiles from a pool, and laying them around the pinwheel tree. You’ll be forming rings with the mushroom paths on each tile. You score benefits for making circles of different sizes, as well as collecting the larger, coloured mushrooms found along the route. These can be sold at the pinwheel market for treasures. And treasures, of course, mean points. The second slice of gameplay is setting your little gnomes to work. You have two gnomes and one of them must have claimed the ring for you to get the goodies from it. You can also use a gnome to take a flower, visit a signpost for a benefit, or sell the things you’ve collected.
Gnome Hollow Review
That the game has these two pretty distinct aspects, has pros and cons. It doesn’t feel disparate, because each turn you do both the tile placement and the worker placement aspect. What it does mean is that while gnome meeples can do more than just claiming features like their Carcassonne-ian ancestors, the game doesn’t really feel much more complex than Carcassonne, but it does take longer.
It also hogs more of the table and feels initially overwhelming as you separate the extensive array of pieces. While tiles have a neat bag to be stored in and drawn from, the treasures and mushrooms will need some extra storage solutions.
It’s a lovely little step up from a gateway game, with lots of different ways to score points, that demonstrates worker placement and how gut-wrenching it is to make those decisions. The variety of end game conditions force players to balance their actions throughout the game, not pursuing any one line of scoring to the exclusion of others.
When taking tiles, hate drafting is possible, but hate building has been made difficult because you have to ask permission from the gnome who owns the route. If someone wants to turn your path in the wrong direction to make it difficult for you to complete, they have to ask you if that’s okay.
For some reason, it took us a long time to get our eye into the shapes, we kept spotting mistakes in tile matching that we’d missed when laying it. We found we were so focussed on the path we were designing that we didn’t notice when the piece didn’t fit. Keep an eagle eye on what’s being put down or you might find things irreversibly confused.
Having said that, it’s a beautiful, good quality game. The magnetic markers on player boards seem unnecessary, but I expect in play testing people often lost track of where they were. It’s a lovely world to get lost in for around an hour, with a lot of satisfying aspects to play.
Gnome Hollow Game: Verdict
You should play Gnome Hollow. It's a colourful, magical nature game to add to your cosy night games list.
You'll especially like it if you like Carcassonne. If you want a gentle step up from Carcassonne, while still keeping tile laying and worker placement, Gnome Hollow is perfect.
Sometimes we may include links to online retailers, from which we might receive a commission if you make a purchase. Affiliate links do not influence editorial coverage and will only be used when covering relevant products
About Gnome Hollow
Designer: Ammon Anderson
Publisher: The OP Games
Time: 45 minutes
Players: 2-4
Ages: 12+
Price: £50
What’s in the box?
- Rulebook
- 4 Player boards
- Stump Tile
- Expansion mushroom trade board
- 32 Ring markers
- 110 Mushroom tokens
- 92 Tiles
- Sunset tile
- Tile bag
- 57 Treasure tokens
- 8 Wildflower tiles
- 32 Flower tokens in 8 colours
- 8 Gnomes
- 7 Signposts
- 21 Pinwheel market tokens
- Pinwheel market board
- Garden tile board
- Drawstring bag
- 4 Player aid cards
- First-player red cap token