Les Fleur Mysterieuses
A Game of Flower Dominoes

I was researching historic game imagery when I stumbled across this French blog titled Old Games Collection. Apart from it being a fantastic site (that has helped in my development of a couple projects already) it featured this Victorian game with captivating imagery.  Maybe I just like flowers a bit much, but I it struck me as magical.

The game dates from the mid 19th century, likely 1856 at latest since that when the blog noted the printer was active.

The site provides some lovely pictures of the playing pieces, box and rules, which I bothered to translate from the original French via google:

​

"This game consists of twelve cards, six of which represent roses joined to other flowers, namely: double rose, dahlia rose, daisy rose, carnation rose, poppy rose; the other six cards represent pansies attached to the same flowers. One player takes the roses, the other the pansies; one poses a card of his choice, and the game is played like dominoes, the flowers replace the points.
Here is the way to win for sure: 1. Avoiding playing first is not an impediment to winning, but a great disadvantage;
2. Avoid making roses everywhere or pansies everywhere before the opponent has done it himself
3. Essentially, play his double only on his fourth card.
By following this principle, we are sure to win even by offering to play discovery"

The translation of course, was not perfect, but I wondered if perhaps it I was missing something due to poor translation. Only twelve dominoes between two people? It seemed overly simple. Nonetheless, I made up some pieces to actually test it. We concluded, after several tries at playing, that the game as it stood, and even with altered permutations of the rules, is not well designed. Basically, if you play first, you win. And that's it. It's meant to be pretty at best.

Well, this won't do for me, and this game deserves better than to be just a lovely conversation piece. A basic, traditional set of dominoes is 28, so therefore my set will be more fleshed out and playable for any domino game that requires that number.

The imagery comes from the
Biodiversity Heritage Library's Flickr page, where you can download all sorts of gorgeous free imagery from botanical prints.

​

The game is currently in progress and I hope to release it sometime this Spring.