Base price: $25.
2 – 6 players.
Play time: 20 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 4 

Full disclosure: A review copy of BLORP! was provided by Smirk & Dagger Games.

We’re vibing; we’re thriving. It’s unfortunately too hot outside today, so photography has been postponed to the nighttime because I’m also too lazy to set up the AC unit in my board game work room. Thankfully, this week’s reviews aren’t going to be sprawling, multi-hour games that I need the whole table for, so photography is going to be pretty easy once I get to it. I actually don’t always do photography before I write the review or vice-versa; it usually just depends on whether or not I feel like I need more information about the game itself that I could get from a simulated play for photography reasons. Neat, right? I hope that’s fun information. But let’s dive into BLORP!

In BLORP!, these whimsical blobs are hanging out! Each player controls their Blorp-o-sphere and tries to grow the most and the biggest Blorps. They’ve got a secret, though: they can communicate with trumpets to expand out even farther! The bigger the Blorp, the more you score! So grow your Blorp-o-sphere in either a turn-based game or a speedy Blitz mode. How big will your Blorps become?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

For the standard game, set aside the Blorp Blitz tiles; you’ll only use those in Blitz mode.

Then, shuffle up and collect your tiles:

Remove the ones with 5 / 6 player icons on the back if you’re playing with fewer than 5 players; otherwise, keep ’em in. Place them in the Blorp Cradle. You should be ready to start!

If you’re looking to play Blorp! Blitz instead, give each player a Blitz Tile, and a stack of 24 / 16 tiles for 2 – 4 / 5+ players. More on that later.

Gameplay

A game of BLORP! is pretty simple! Each turn, you’ll take a tile from the center and place it in your personal area (your Blorp-o-Sphere). When you do, you must place it so that all its edges align with adjacent edges, by color. Orange touches orange, red touches red, green touches green, and blue touches blue. That’s all well and good, and you can build Blorps as big as you’d like. After you place a turn, flip a new tile from the cradle for the next player’s turn.

Some tiles have Spores or Confetti on them; place those tiles such that all edges touch other blue edges.

Play until there are four tiles left in the Cradle! Then, finish the round so that each player gets an equal number of turns. Then score!

To score, each player needs to count up their biggest Blorp of each color. To do so, count not just the tiles in a Blorp but count Blorps connected via trumpets (or connected to completed Blorps via trumpets that face each other). It’s kind of a lot, but you can connect multiple different Blorps of the same color if you’re careful! Spores score 5 points if they have a tile above, below, and to the left and right of them, and 6 points if they’re completely surrounded. Confetti lets you connect four trumpets to it (and by extension, each other). 2 points per tile in your largest completed Blorp of each color; 1 point for tiles in your other completed Blorps. The player(s) with the largest Blorp of each color gets 10 points for that color, and the player with the most completed Blorps gets 10 points as well. Player with the most points wins!

Player Count Differences

Generally, no not many, here. There’s not a ton of player interaction, which is usually the critical element of player count differences. The one worth noting is that the size of the tile market doesn’t change with more players, so at, say, six, you have a legitimate chance that all of the tiles in the market will be different between two of your turns. That’s sometimes good, unless there are two tiles you desperately need in the market, but you have a chance of losing unclaimed tiles at two players, anyways. They do add more tiles to the game with 5+ players, but that’s mostly because otherwise the game would be incredibly short. So that’s not a huge difference with scaling either. With Bloop Blitz, you’re really only affecting the player to your left and being affected by the player to your right, so there’s not much to report there either. With more players, at least, you’re not giving tiles to and taking tiles from the same player. I think as a result I like the Blorp Blitz with more players and the turn-based game with fewer. That’s nice coverage, though!

Strategy

• I personally shoot for big connected Blorps, rather than a bunch of little ones. I think it’s better to try and get the 10 bonus points for the big Blorps in each color, rather than trying to get 10 points for having the most (and missing out on the points per tile in the biggest Blorp you have of each color). I think it’s more efficient.
• You should have at least one big Blorp in a certain color, though; keep an eye on what your opponents are doing, there. Either way, yeah, get one big Blorp. That way you’ll be able to make the most of your tiles, but you should try not to race another person for a big Blorp of a certain color, otherwise you’ll end up splitting the difference on tiles (since you’re both taking, for instance, every green tile you can get).
• Keep a couple trumpets open to try and connect sections of your play area. The more Blorps you can connect with trumpets, the better you can do with connectivity. Just be careful; if you connect all your Blorps via trumpets, you’ll just end up with one big one of each color.
• At maybe the halfway point of the game (especially with more players), start looking to close your bigger Blorps so that you don’t get left holding the bag. You don’t want to leave your biggest Blorp open if you can avoid it, for instance, and you certainly want to try and close as many as you can before the game ends so that they can score.
• Remember: incomplete Blorps can’t be used for a connection. Completed Blorps are pretty much the most critical aspect of the game. You need them for points and you need them for the connectivity off of trumpets. Even making a bunch of small Blorps is fine if they’re connected via trumpets!
• With Blorp Blitz, don’t pass too many tiles! Tiles you pass to your opponent can slow them down, yes, but you’re also giving them more tiles. If they’re playing quickly, then they’re going to get more points from the improved real estate options.
• Completing Blorps is even more important in Blitz, since you can’t know when the game will end. Anything left open can really mess you up, since the game can end at any time. Similarly, try to keep an eye on other players’ progress so that you know when to start locking things down. This is not a game mode where you want to get surprised.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• I genuinely love the art style and vibe of the game, somewhere between Dr. Seuss and some body-horror Junji Ito-lookin’ thing. It’s fun; it’s bouncy; there’s a single tile that’s just a giant screaming mouth. What’s not to love?
• The trumpets make things very interesting. As mentioned, they allow you to connect Blorps even if they aren’t adjacent, and they let you connect Blorps through other completed Blorps of different colors. That’s neat! It lets you play with the spatial element of the game in a way that’s very different than, say, Carcassonne.
• The speed mode is pretty interesting. It makes me wonder if there’s a chance for a real-time Carcassonne of some kind. Real-time tile-laying games are for sickos, so I’m absolutely interested. They’re all great.
• The core concepts are pretty simple. You just essentially gotta match up colors for edges, and that’s a pretty clear and easy thing to do.
• Generally plays pretty quickly. Note that there are some caveats to this, specifically that spatial games can be tough for some players if visualization isn’t entirely their thing, but it’s still pretty quick to play otherwise, especially in the speed mode.
• I do like that you can pass unplayable tiles in the speed mode. It keeps things moving and interesting, since passing a tile is essentially a penalty. You’re giving an opponent more tiles, which slows them down while potentially letting them get more points. It’s a smart trade-off.

Mehs

• The Bloop Blitz starting tile has slightly rounded edges compared to the other tiles. I assume it’s to make it easier to identify it later in the game, but it gives me a little type-A frustration. It, unfortunately, be like that sometimes.
• I think it would be nice to have some clearer distinctions about when Blorps are and aren’t connected. Just making either thicker edges or more clear gaps between Blorps that share a tile would be nice and helpful.
• We did have one game where three Spores ended up in our four-tile shared draw area. That did make the game a little silly for a round or two. Not bad, just a consequence of having multiple tiles in the draw area; eventually, the market gets a bit polluted (and it would be nice to be able to refresh it).
• I intellectually understand why you stop at four tiles left in the stack, but it’s kind of weird. I think it’s to prevent running out of tiles and to leave some tiles left over so that you don’t always have the same tiles in play, but it really seems like you should just set four tiles aside and then end the game once the cradle is empty, front-loading that information rather than relying on players to remember it at the end of the game.

Cons

• Scoring is a huge pain here, since it’s complicated. It doubles back on itself in some frustrating ways. While it’s cool that Blorps can be connected across Blorps of other colors via trumpets, it makes things difficult to calculate without taking some kind of holistic view of your play area. While you’re doing that, you also need to calculate the number of distinct Blorps so that you can check if you get the superlative compared to other players. That goes against the trumpets since they create one big Blorp. You can’t scan your play area as easily, as a result.
• There are some gaps in the rulebook. The main one that comes to mind is about trumpets and the idea of connectivity. Two trumpets that are facing each other connect their respective Blorps, even through other color Blorps as long as they are all connected (when even the idea of connectivity is a bit confusing). Likely corner-to-corner connectivity doesn’t count, but if trumpets are facing each other with something in the way, when does that count? Is it a lake-style connectivity thing where as long as there’s blue space (or nothing) between them, it’s fine? Do Blorps make a bridge over the blue (thinking of it in a 3D sense) or do they block connectivity between trumpets? This did come up in our games and unfortunately we couldn’t find an example (or a counterexample) in the rules. Some of it is because the game’s rules are somewhat based in the game’s language, which makes things more confusing than they need to be.
• There’s a certain inescapable element of luck in the speed game. For instance, I got almost twice as many trumpets as my opponent in the last Blorp Blitz I played, which helped me a lot! I also got significantly more end pieces, while they got a bunch of 3-edges (which are better for expanding the area of a Blorp, not closing it). It may be somewhat inescapable since you’re shuffling the tiles, but it doesn’t feel great to start behind the 8 ball.

Overall: 6.75 / 10

Overall, I think Blorp! is fun, but it does suffer from a few things that bring my opinion of it down a bit compared to other tile-laying games. The first is pretty simple: at a high level, the game has a few rough edges, from scoring to rules to interactions. It’s not necessarily that I think there’s some obvious fix to them, either; I just find some elements of them frustrating. I think that the trumpet connectivity rules should be clearer with more examples or counterexamples, and I’d like to see it be easier to track how that impacts scoring and Blorp size versus Blorp number. The latter is particularly difficult to do in a non-digital environment, but while I’m sympathetic it’s still challenging as a player to calculate it. That challenge decreases a bit with player count as you have fewer tiles that are just yours, but half of the fun of a tile-laying game is getting to build a big valuable area that’s kind of your own thing. Extra clarity around a bunch of things both visual and gameplay-wise would help a lot. That said, the core of the game is still quite fun. People (it’s me; I’m people) just really like combining tiles and making a big thing, and the idea that you can still count closed-off areas as long as they’re connected by trumpets feels like cheating in a way that makes you, the player, feel like you’re getting special treatment. It’s nice. The speed mode is another pleasant addition, as a fan of real-time games, though I’ll confess we’ve certainly just eyeballed the boards and declared a winner instead of scoring it by hand, before. I imagine it gets easier the more you do it. The art is genuinely fantastic and awful at the same time, so I’m a fan there, too. The game encapsulates a lot of whimsy, and I do think that’s pleasant despite some of the sticking points. If you’re looking for a whimsical tile-laying game, you enjoy some high-speed gameplay, or you just want to make some blobs even blobbier, BLORP! might be right up your alley!

For more tile-laying game recommendations, check out my Tile-Laying Games Hub!

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