Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
If you’ve played the game Pixies and liked it as much as I do, then you’ll be pleased to hear that Pixies has returned, better than ever, with an all-new expansion. Consisting of just 14 new cards, the Pixies: Flower Power expansion introduces even more intriguing mechanics and adorable critters into the mix. Before continuing, if you’re not familiar with how the game is played, I recommend you go check out my review of Pixies so that the rest of this review will make sense. It’s a small game, so it’ll only take you a few minutes.
Each card in this expansion is bi-colored, which means it’s easier than ever to create large color zones. This is the first new change. Beware: the bi-color nature of this expansion comes with a dark side. Many of the cards will score you negative points for having particular colors in your display. Bi-color cards count as two colors, so it’s very easy to get yourself into trouble if you’re not careful.
The second big change is that, during end-of-round scoring, face down cards are worth five points apiece, and there are even some cards that will earn you extra spirals for having face down cards in your tableau. Even without the bi-color cards, this small tweak completely changes how you think about the game. In the base game, deciding what to do with a face down card was easy. You put it wherever your highest valued empty space was in the hopes that it would get auto-validated later. However, now that face down cards are worth five points each, players are far more likely to place these into lower value spots since they have the potential to score more points unvalidated. This has the effect of making it harder to validate the higher value cards which, in turn, creates more competition to remove those cards from the lineup.
I’ll admit, when I opened the box this expansion was mailed in and found what appeared to be a booster pack for a trading card game sitting there (yes, this is how this expansion is packaged), I wasn’t expecting much. Just how much value could 14 small cards actually add? Not much, I was willing to wager.
It’s a good thing nobody was around to take me up on that wager because I would have lost my shirt.
Pixies: Flower Power is the kind of expansion you dream about, an expansion that honors its predecessor, elevating the experience, and adding to it without taking anything away from it. It’s tiny in size, fitting into the base game box with just the slightest bit of lid lift. The added rules overhead is negligible, with the entire rules set fitting onto the front and back of a fifteenth card. And, it’s so easy to incorporate that I doubt I’ll ever play Pixies without it ever again.
Pixies: Flower Power proves that not every expansion needs to be huge to have a huge impact.
Pixies: Flower Power details
- Designer: Johannes Goupy
- Artists: Sylvain Trabut
- Publishers: Bombyx, Gam'inBIZ, Pandasaurus Games, Pegasus Spiele, Tranjis Games
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 2 - 6
- Age range : 8+
- Time range : 30 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Connections, Open Drafting, Set Collection
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.58444 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about Pixies: Flower Power.
