Bloom

🎮 About This Game

Bloom is a territory duel where you never claim ground directly — you plant things that race for it. Each round, both players drop one seed onto the 9×9 soil, and then the whole garden grows: every plant's territory expands one ring into the empty cells around it. When two colours reach the same cell in the same instant, neither gets it — the cell turns to bramble, dead ground for the rest of the game. Whoever has grown the larger garden when the soil runs out wins. A match is two gardens, and that is a fairness rule, not padding: the last seed of a garden goes unanswered, and our balance measurements showed it is worth a great deal — so the second garden flips the planting order, handing that final word to each player exactly once, and the winner is decided by the summed area across both boards. The result is a duel that feels like gardening and plays like a knife fight over real estate: every seed is a bet about where the fronts will collide three rounds from now.

🎯 How to Play

On your turn, tap any bare soil cell to plant a seed (or move the cursor with the arrow keys and press SPACE). Once both players have planted, the garden grows one ring: each plant's territory spreads into every adjacent empty cell. A cell reached by both colours in the same tick becomes bramble — thorny dead ground that belongs to nobody and blocks growth for the rest of the garden. You cannot plant on anything that is not bare soil. A garden is 5 seeds each. After the last round, growth runs out on its own until nothing can spread — that final reel is where the match is usually decided. A match is 2 gardens with the planting order flipped in the second; your running total is shown at the top, and the larger summed area wins the match. If the totals tie, the player who won more individual gardens takes it, and if that ties too, a short sudden-death garden settles things. Solo mode plays a CPU on Easy, Normal or Hard — it plants by exactly the same rules you do.

💡 Tips & Strategy

• ▸Think in rings, not cells. A seed planted in open ground claims territory in every direction at once, so the value of a spot is roughly how much empty soil sits within a few rings of it — before your opponent's fronts get there first.
• ▸The bramble rule cuts both ways. Where two fronts meet at the same instant, both of you lose the ground — so meeting an opponent's front head-on wastes territory for both sides. Sometimes that is exactly what you want: a wall of bramble between their plant and open soil is a fence they can never grow through.
• ▸Plant behind their lines, not in front of them. A seed dropped into a pocket your opponent thought was theirs converts the whole pocket race — the cells they were going to reach in three ticks are suddenly contested in one.
• ▸Watch the parity of distances. A cell goes to whoever reaches it first, and growth is one ring per round — so you can read exactly who wins every patch of soil by counting rings. The whole game is on the board; nothing is hidden.
• ▸The last seed of each garden is answered by nobody — our measurements put the advantage of holding it at 83% in that garden. You get it in one garden and your opponent gets it in the other, so plan for which garden you want to spend your strength in.
• ▸Do not copy your opponent's plants mirrored across the board. It feels safe and it loses — a mirror never creates an advantage, and the first asymmetry decides everything. Our mirror-strategy test bot lost 100% of its matches.
• ▸In the second garden, remember the totals carry over. If you are ahead on the running total, a garden full of bramble walls that freezes the board early protects your lead; if you are behind, you need open soil and bigger races.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions