A Gentle Rain

A Date With…

It’s a gentle rain… The mood is set. Peter Sandberg’s minimalist, modern classical is playing on Alexa. The sun is going down. A cup of something soothing sits on a coaster. An empty chair waits patiently for me to sit at the table in the conservatory. It’s time to “take a deep breath and relax”……..

Okay so this could sound like the beginning of a dinner date or a massage (or both if the date goes well! Haha). But it’s not. I’m not actually sure it’s the beginning of “a game” in the usual sense of that word. But what I do know is that it is a lovely encounter between my brain and breathing.

A Gentle Touch

A Gentle Rain by Mondo Games is a single player experience. Set in a zen place, you are building a lake tile by tile. Each tile shows 4 half flowers of different colours/designs. As you lay out your lake, lily blossoms will form where two matching halves touch. And when 4 tiles touch, a circular space appears ripe for a blossoming lily token that matches one of the completed lily colours that surrounds it. If all 8 blossoms bloom before the tiles run out, you win. If you want to. Or don’t win. It’s entirely up to you.

And that is what is so unusual and lovely about A Gentle Rain. You can build your lake with the intention of siting all 8 blossoms as efficiently as possible – your final score will be 8 + X (X being the number of tiles left in your draw stack). Or you can just lay out your lake and see what happens. See how luck and your imagination meld together to form a new and interesting pattern every time you play.

The Instructions are more about breathing than playing. Their intention is to encourage you to allow yourself a calm moment. A time to breathe. A time to focus on one thing, separate from the noise around you.

Active Meditation

And I love that. I am not a natural relaxer. I do not “do nothing”. At the risk of a double negative (see how worked up it makes me?!), I cannot “do nothing”. I find the absence of activity the most stressful experience of all. But A Gentle Rain (and other great solo games I play like Village Green, Cascadia, and more) fixes that. It is an active meditation. My brain is kept busy whilst my body unclenches. For 15 minutes, my mind is shielded from the chaos and ND sensory overload that smacks into me every second of every day.

The components are lovely. A sturdy little box, 8 wooden tokens, and a laminated leaflet accompany beautiful, thick tiles. My only niggle is when lining up the tiles perfectly, the holes created are just a fraction too small for the tokens. And so when placed into the spaces, the do create small gaps between the tiles. But by that point I am so into my zen moment that I can just about forgive that little scale snafoo.

Final Thoughts

As a relatively new solo gamer, quick to the table, brain soothing, shackle dropping soloable games are my wheelhouse. I don’t enjoy setting up games. I don’t have the time or the patience. If I can shoehorn a little jangle-calming time after work or between, chores, family activities, and life’s hiccups, I want to be playing as soon as I have pulled the box from the shelf. And A Gentle Rain achieves that.

One stack, 8 tokens, and we are off. Yes there is luck of the draw when taking a tile, but it’s what you do with it that counts. I love the simplicity and I love the lack of pace and pressure. I am aware that this is completely different to the cutthroat competitive 2 player gamer in me. But maybe that’s just how it should be. An omni gamer in not only mechanisms but also in attitude.

However it works, I am extremely grateful for the moments of mad-less that A Gentle Rain brings to me. The box does suggest it can be played co-operatively. And I am sure some folks will like the discussion and collegiate approach to building and blossoming. But, when it comes to lovely solo games, the only contemplation I want to consider is my own – Favouritefoe doesn’t share solo games!