Flourish and Decay is a deck‑building strategy game played atop Conway's Game of Life. In the game your battle field is the meeting of microbiome and macro human environment. Acquire valuable resources and powerful action cards to define a novel strategy, and crush your Physarian foes.
It is in this dual arena that you will compete in a winner-take-all battle with your Physarian kin. Each of you knows that there can only be one dominant Physarian species on Earth.
Your species is represented by colored game pieces that grow and change according to Conway's Game of Life. Use the cards you acquire to place cells, and spread slime across the grid — steering the simulation to favor your species.
There are 2 types of game pieces. Cells and Slime. Pieces of the same color represent your species on the game board and are used at the end of the game in scoring.
Cells are strategically placed by players during gameplay. They may also be born into existence according to the rules of Conway's Game of Life (explained later).
Cells always leave behind slime. Think of it as a footprint of where your species has been! These are flat square pieces that sit underneath cells. They are also the primary component of your final score.
In F&D, the game board is a simulation of Conway's Game of Life. The size of the grid is adjusted for the number of players.
How does one win Flourish and Decay? How do you prove that you and your Physarian counterpart are the slimiest creatures to ever walk the earth? Scoring is simple.
Through gameplay (and clever strategy) you will spread your game pieces accross the board. Cells are your primary engine for growth and slime records the effective score board.
Scoring occurs at the end of the game where each slime belonging to a player is worth 1 point. Cells do not score directly. The player with the most points is victorious.
This is the game board, an implementation of Conway's Game of Life (CGOL). CGOL is a representation of cellular growth over time (generations). In each passing generation, cells live or die based on the condition of their neighbors.
Click the board to add cells. Click the buttons below to cause generations to pass! The rules of CGOL can be summarized as follows:
- Survival: Any live cell with 2-3 living neighbors survives to the next generation.
- Loneliness: Any live cell with fewer than 2 living neighbors dies, as if by loneliness.
- Overcrowding: Any live cell with more than 3 living neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
- Reproduction: New cells are born into empty grid spaces when those spaces have exactly 3 live neighbors.
Cards constitute the other major component of gameplay (other than cells and slime) and form a large part of winning strategies. Throughout the game you will build your deck by acquiring cards.
There are two card types: Food (gives calories) and Action (explicit, self-describing effects). You'll get details later in the Deck Building section. Here is a depiction of a given players' play area. Note that each player has a hand, deck and discard pile.
Flourish & Decay uses two token resources which you can obtain by playing cards from your hand: Calories and Placements.
Depicted here are your resource tokens, with 3 Calories (⚡) and 3 Placements (+).
The Central Mold is the source of biodiversity in Flourish and Decay, offering a set of cards available for all players for deck-building.
To begin, select 8 action cards. 10 copies of each are placed into stacks. There are 7 types of food cards, with 15 copies of each also placed into stacks.
Each player starts the game with eight crumbs, the smallest denomination of food card. These are dealt seperately from the cards included in the central mold.
These crumbs will form the basis for your organisms growth. However, you'll want to start quickly acquiring more powerful or higher value cards to outcompete the other Physarians on the board.
Having crash landed into earth, you need to choose a starting location for your species. In two subsequent setup rounds, players receive three placemnets resources. They use these to place cells (and corresponding slime) on the board in any location. Once all players have committed, the placements are revealed simultaneously.
At the end of the seed phase, each player will have placed 6 cells and 6 slime. Once the seed phase is complete, the game begins and each players draws four cards from their deck.
Here is an example of each of the players (Euphemia Taylor, Edgar Crook, David Ashcroft) placements during the seed phase.
At the start of your turn, draw four cards from your deck. If there aren’t enough cards to draw a full hand, follow the reshuffle rules described in Deck Building - Drawing Cards.
What you draw shapes your turn’s strategy, and your turn's strategy shapes what you'll draw in the future!
If you draw a substantial number of resource cards, you may want to make an expensive purchase from the central mold to set yourself up for success. Or you may choose to bank your calories for use duing the simultaneous play phase. If you draw lower value cards, you may take an opportunity to prune them from your deck with an action card like excision.
Some cards create duration effects that persist across turns. Resolve any outstanding duration effects after you draw your initial four cards, and before your turn begins. For example, if you played Delicacy last turn, you gain +3 calories now.
Delicacy is an Action card that rewards careful planning: when played, it doesn't immediately grant a calorie bonus. Instead, at the start of your next turn, you receive extra calories — no card required. This delayed payoff lets you set up a more impactful turn where you can combine these extra calories with whatever cards you draw into your hand. Duration effects are critical in the early game to establish a resource advantage and acquire higher value cards than your opponents.
On your turn, play your action / food cards by laying them down in the played cards area in front of your player mat. Playing food cards gives you calories. When playing action cards, resolve their effects immediately.
You may play any card in your hand, in any order. Often the order of played cards informs your unique strategy! In this example, the player has played a shipment card and a crumb card. The shipment card caused an immediate draw of 2 cards, and the crumb card gives them 1 calorie.
You may purchase a card at any point during your turn. You may not purchase cards during simultaneous play.
Each card in Flourish and Decay specifies both an Adaptation Cost and a Caloric Value. In order to acquire a card you must pay the Adaptation cost denominated in calories. Once you have done so, add the acquired card to your discard pile. Action cards most commonly have no caloric value — instead they specify an explicit effect on the state of a game.
In the Central Mold, purchasable cards are organized into stacks. When you purchase a card, you take the top card from its stack. When a stack is fully purchased (empty), that card is out of commission for the rest of the game — it’s out of play.
When you end your turn, discard all cards from your hand and the played cards area.
Keep all of your remaining calories or placements — you will use these in simultaneous play to place cells or advance generations once all players have ended their turns.
There’s almost always no benefit to holding a card back — if you can play it, you usually should. The main reason a card might stay unplayed is that its effect can’t be applied (for example: no valid target or conditions).
Placing cells is how you turn resources into territory. Each cell you commit to the board spends 1 Placement (+) — your cleanest, most flexible way to expand.
If you place more cells than you have placements available, the shortfall is paid in Calories: each extra cell costs 2 Calories (⚡).
This tradeoff is the heart of simultaneous play: every calorie you convert into an “extra placement” is a calorie you can’t spend purchasing powerful actions cards or advancing generations. Sometimes you want more biomass on the board; sometimes you want to push time forward and let CGOL do the work.
Tip: plan your placements as a connected group. A tight, strategically shaped cluster can claim space, reinforce your position, and threaten opponents — while a scattered placement often just feeds other organisms.
During simultaneous play, you can spend calories to advance the board forward in time. Each “generation” is one step of Conway’s Game of Life (CGOL), where cells live or die based on their neighbors.
Open the Action Panel and choose “Generations” to set how many generations you want to purchase for this phase. You can confirm to lock it in, or cancel to keep your current value.
The price increases for each marginal generation you buy (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, …). The total cost is the sum of those prices (for example: 4 generations costs 1 + 1 + 2 + 3 = 7 calories).
Your generation budget is whatever calories you have left after accounting for any cell placement costs (including any extra cells placed beyond your free placements).
When you end simultaneous play, you must dispose of any unused calories and placements — both reset to 0.
This is the cleanup step that closes the round. Make your cell placements and generation purchases first — anything left over is discarded.
Deck building is a common game mechanic, and the art of tactically constructing a set of cards to execute a deliberate strategy.
Cards are organized into 6 areas.
At any point during the game you need to draw cards, you will do so from your deck — the cards you’ve acquired so far. If your deck has an insufficient number of cards for the amount you must draw, reshuffle your discard pile to create a new deck. If you still can’t draw the full amount (because both your deck and discard pile are empty), draw as many as you can.
Draw all available cards from your deck. Shuffle your discard pile; the shuffled discard pile becomes your new deck, then continue drawing until you’ve drawn the required number (or run out). In this example, the player plays shipment which causes them to immediately draw two cards.
Some action cards will allow you to “trash” cards. Trashed cards are removed from play — they do not go to your discard pile, and therefore are not shuffled back into your deck.
Trashing is a way to thin weak cards (like crumbs) so you draw your best cards more often. In this example, the player plays Excision to trash two Crumbs from hand.
There are two card types: Food and Action. Cards usually show two calorie values:
Food cards: your fuel. Play them for calories, then spend those calories to grow (place cells) and improve your deck (buy cards).
Action cards: immediate, self-describing effects that change the game state. They often trade calories for impact (higher cost, lower/zero value).
The heart of gameplay (and strategy) in Flourish & Decay is covering the game board with your species' cells and slime. The game board is a simulation of Conway's Game of Life (CGOL).
CGOL is a deep and fascinating representation of cellular life. For the mathematically inclined, it's a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It's also Turing complete! Not a math-person? No worries! These are important rules to consider, but you don't need the details to win.
As a reminder, there are four simple rules that are applied each generation:
- Survival: Any live cell with 2-3 living neighbors survives to the next generation.
- Loneliness: Any live cell with fewer than 2 living neighbors dies, as if by loneliness.
- Overcrowding: Any live cell with more than 3 living neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
- Reproduction: New cells are born into empty grid spaces when those spaces have exactly 3 live neighbors.
There are an infinite number of shapes and possibilities in CGOL. This creative and emergent gameplay is the heart of Flourish & Decay. Below are a few examples of shapes with a specific function that could help your species conquer the board.
The flyer shape is self-perpetuating and moves diagonally across the board. The century shape grows and changes before stabilizing after approximately 100 generations.
The astute reader (or generally slime-ready individual) may be thinking, wait! When cells are born, what color should they be? The simplest scenario is with a single species. The new cell will be the same as its neighbors. When two species neighbor an empty cell, the largest contiguous group's species is born.
When there are three species, the largest adjacent contiguous slime determines which species' cell is born. If there is still a tie, the species closest to the North West corner of the board is born.
That's it - time to slime.