Officinalis

OF­FI­CINALIS is a game in which play­ers em­body wise pick­ers who roam wild lands in search of medi­cinal plants. The game has 49 dis­tinct plants with proven vir­tues and 4 spe­cial cards. Alone or as a team, play­ers will have to com­pete for the best plants be­fore their op­pon­ent (s).

 

The game has 7 large fam­il­ies of plants that cor­res­pond to the nat­ural en­vir­on­ments in which they grow (Com­mons, Forests, Rivers, Gar­dens, Landes, Prair­ies and Aro­matic). In nature, most of these plants breed in sev­eral en­vir­on­ments, but for the pur­poses of the game, we chose to "cat­egor­ize" them in the one where they most gen­er­ally evolve.

 

Each place con­tains 7 plants: 5 wide­spread plants, 1 rare plant and 1 toxic plant. For sim­pli­city, we call Toxic, a plant that is po­ten­tially dan­ger­ous. In real­ity, most of these plants can have be­ne­fi­cial vir­tues if prop­erly used. As Paracelsus (con­sidered the father of tox­ic­o­logy) so aptly puts it: "Everything is poison, noth­ing is poison ... It's a ques­tion of dosage". The game also in­cludes 4 plants in­ven­ted for the game. They have spe­cial exotic abil­it­ies that pleas­antly spice up the game­play.

 

The last 7 cards are the pick­ers, they are not play­able and are used to define the fa­vor­ite place of each player.

 

To win the game, you have to ac­cu­mu­late as many points as pos­sible by har­vest­ing plants. The rarer the plant, the more points it yields. On the other hand, toxic plants make them lose.

 

But the secret to being vic­tori­ous is to cre­ate In­fu­sions by com­bin­ing cer­tain plants to score bonus points that will make all the dif­fer­ence. There are 12 pos­sible com­bin­a­tions: Anti-Stress, Tonic, Cir­cu­la­tion, Fem­in­ine, Detox, Hep­at­itis, Res­pir­at­ory, Di­gest­ive, Sil­hou­ette, Wishes, Ar­tic­u­la­tion and Peace­ful Night.

 

A round ends when all the rare plants (the Mer­veilles) have been har­ves­ted. This rule point may seem trivial but it adds a very in­ter­est­ing no­tion of stress. In­deed, the round can end after two or three rounds, so it may be wise to take risks to score more points ... Or not. An­other im­port­ant de­tail is that the gam­ing ex­per­i­ence is very dif­fer­ent de­pend­ing on the num­ber of play­ers.

 

The game is played in 7 rounds but noth­ing pre­vents you to shorten or ex­tend the game if you want it.