Our review

fragrances for all

Parfum

Selling in two bottle sizes

Just like many women, I suppose, I love to browse around on shelves in perfumeries, smelling the different perfume bottles and searching for my ideal scent.

This quest for my perfect scent is always very exciting for me and therefore I was very much interested in the new game by Queen and my expectations therefore were rather high, also because recently I have again liked the new games published by Queen Games much more.

The cover of the game box shows a golden scent bottle with a landscape at sundown in the background. When opening the box you find these components: A double-sided game board, four perfumeries, 42 fragrance notes, represented by tiles, aroma dice – three each for five aromas, 25 customers, 25 water well tiles, 25 flacons, seven clocks, four scoring markers, 1 cloth bag and closing time token as well as the rule book.

The components are nicely done and get a nice flair across, and all the women in my test games were pleased with the components.

What is the game about? You roll the aroma dice and try to achieve fragrance notes. If you managed to roll suitable aromas, you can take the corresponding fragrance not and also receive a small amount of money. Let me say this, at the moment I cannot recall a game where I am rewarded for the picking up of resources with money.

Using the fragrance notes you can in due course then produce perfume and sell those perfumes to customers in flacons of different size.

That’s it for a short summary, before we turn to the details:

Not surprisingly we put the board on the table, shuffle the fragrance notes a bit and put them into the bag.

Customers are separated by their backsides into those for Phase A and those for Phase B, then you place – depending on the side of the board you use – four or five customers A on the designated spots. Customers of Phase B are shuffled together with the Closing Time token and then stacked face down next to the board; the remaining customers of Phase A are stacked, again face-down, on top of Phase B customers to form a face-down draw pile.

From the bag you draw six fragrance notes in case two or four players and displayed openly on the board, in a game of three players you display five fragrance notes.

Out of the seven clock you use the dark ones in case of two or four players, the three light ones in case of three players.

The water well tiles show zero to three money on their back sides, and they are shuffled backside-down. Each player takes one perfumery, one scoring marker and two water well tiles, blank side up.

The game is played in rounds, and each round is comprising three phases.

Phase 1 – Turn order determination:

In Phase 1 players each choose one clock which determines the turn order of the current round. A starting player was chosen at the start of the game, he beings Phase 1 or round 1 with the selection of a clock. In all other rounds it is always the player who commands fewest money on the counting track who chooses first, then the player with the second-fewest money chooses, and so on.

Besides the turn order, the clock also determines the number of actions that you can do in this round. The Clock with “1” gives you starting player and only three actions; Clock “2” gives you second place in turn order and four actions to do, Clock “3” gives you third place and five actions and Clock “4” lets you do six actions.

Phase 2 Perfume Creation:

In this phase you now have the number of actions at your command that your choice of clock has given you:

Possible actions are: Take any one aroma cube – take any face-down water-well tile of your choice or draw one fragrance note from the bag.

The action „Draw one fragrance note from the bag“ is never available for the starting player of the round, as all spaces for fragrance notes on the board are filled at the start of the round and thus there is no room for additional notes.

If you took an aroma die you can try to roll aromas. This rolling for aromas is not an action by itself, but is part of the action “Take any one aroma die”, but you roll the die only when all your other actions are done.

There are the five aromas of Violet, Bergamot, Rose, Vanilla and Lavender. For each of those aromas there are three dice in the respective colors. The aroma dice for Violets, Bergamot and rose show four times the symbol for Aroma and 2x the symbol of a fly. If you roll the aroma symbol you have achieved the respective essence, if you roll the fly, you failed. The aroma dice for Vanilla and Lavender show 3x aroma and 3x fly.

We have noticed in our test games that the starting player very often did use all his three actions to roll three dice for aromas.

Fragrance notes show one or several aromas which a player must manage to roll so that he can acquire a certain fragrance note. When a player has rolled the necessary aromas for one or several fragrance notes on display he can instantly take those fragrance notes, which show different amounts of money. The marker of the player on the money track is immediately advanced by that sum.

What do I need the fragrance notes for? You can use them to produce perfume flacons in your perfumery. Each perfumery has room for one flacon of two fragrance notes to the left and room for a flacon of three fragrance notes to the right.

The fragrance notes are showing flacon parts in the front, top middle or bottom, so that to the left of your perfumery you can produce a perfume of top and bottom, that is, head and base note, to the right you need top, middle and bottom for head, heart and base note.

If you produce a perfume of head and base note you receive two wooden flacons as soon as you have added the second fragrance note. If you produce a perfume of three fragrance notes you receive three flacons.

Water well tiles can be easier acquired when you come later in turn order.

With the water well tiles that you pick up with the empty side up you can change the results of your dice rolls. When you discard such a tile you can either re-roll all flies in one dice color or all dice, but in this case you must also re-roll all dice showing an aroma result. When you discard two water well tiles you can change a dice result from one fly to one aroma.

The action „draw from the bag“ is most and foremost used by players in third and fourth place in a round to enter fragrance notes into the game so that you might have fragrance notes on display that you can use for your perfumes.

Phase 3 Sale of perfumes:

In this phase players can, in the turn order of the current round, sell flacons to the customers that are on display, provided that their perfume does at minimum contain the aromas that the customer wishes for. Each player may sell one flacon to start with. Then a second round of sales follows, in which each player can sell a second flacon. Any player you cannot sell or does not want to, must pass.

The customers on display show different amounts of money. The marker of a player is advanced on the money track by this amount.

Towards the end of the game it can happen that players own perfumes that no customer wants to buy; for that contingency there is a general market where you can sell perfumes of two parts for 2 money units and perfumes of three parts for three units of money. In Phase 3 Sales there are always only two rounds of sales, therefore you need to take care to have sold all flacons at the end of the game, because they are then worthless.

The game can end in two ways:

- The game ends in the round of the game in which the Closing Time token is drawn for a customer, the current round is played to the end.

- Another way for the game to end is the situation when at the start of the round you cannot draw enough fragrance notes from the bag to fill all empty slots; in this case the game ends instantly.

The winner at the end of the game is whoever has earned most money!

There are certain similarities, if you are familiar with Fresco by the same designers, especially the determination of turn order sequence for the current round. Unfortunately, the game does not have the same depth as Fresco and also is not as much fun, either. In my plays women did like the game better, most men did not like it a lot. I believe this might be – despite the not very big fun - because of the topic which women like better.

The element of chance is very dominant in the game and strategic considerations are rarely necessary. Usually you are totally dependent on the current situation on the board, which only results in short-term tactical considerations.

The structuring of the rules was thought by some of my fellow players to be somewhat unclear. The examples, however, and the picture explanations, are easily understood.

The graphic design was very well received, especially by women.

All in all my probably too high expectations have not been met, but players with not much playing experience will have fun with the game all the same.

My conclusion – a simple family game with a high element of chance that can provide a lot of fun to newcomers.

To all players with higher demands towards a game I recommend Fresco by the same designers that was also published by Queen and receives very often on many a games table.

Maria Schranz

Players: 2-4

Age: 8+

Time: 45+

Designer: Marcel Süßelbeck, Marco Ruskowski

Artist: Claus Stephan, Marcel Süßelbeck

Price: ca. 25 Euro

Publisher: Queen Games 2015

Web: www.queen-games.com

Genre: Dice, set collection

Users: For families

Version: de

Rules: de en

In-game text: no

Comments:

Nice components

Women like the game better than men do

Good game for beginners

Compares to:

Fresco for some mechanisms

Other editions:

Multilingual edition, Queen games (de en)

My rating: 4

Maria Schranz:

A game with a very high element of chance which rarely needs strategic consideration, but some short-term tactics.

Chance (pink): 3

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 1

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 1

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0