Were growing all-new challenges for the new year! This update offers continued support for upcoming weekly and monthly challenges, bringing new flowers, twists, and surprises youll want to set your weekly alarm for.

\nIn this update:

• Support for a dozen new challenges with fun new mechanics

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• Fixed a bug where the wrong challenge name could appear in some spots

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Its a brand new year! Have you made any resolutions to keep your brain in shape or try something new? If so, might I recommend our newest Primrows challenges?\n\n\n\nIn Januarys monthly challenge, youll have two chances to score in every category instead of just one. This makes for an extended-play challenge that rewards consistent performance over brief flashes of luck. Youll definitely want to try for a perfect Prize Garden in this challengeeven if you fall short, youll have four total chances at the high-scoring catch-all categories.\n\nLong-time Primrows fans will recognize this as one of the play modes from the original 2010 mobile version of the game, and it has finally made its return to the remake. Its the perfect challenge to pass the time during post-holiday travel, or to play while bundled up in blankets weathering the cold.\n\nWeekly challenges continue to arrive every Monday as well, so keep coming back then to discover something new! This month youll test your mettle in a chess-themed challenge, play detective, AND be seeing double with a cool new garden shape.

Bundle up and grab a steaming cup of hot cocoa winter has arrived! No need to worry about our thriving garden ecosystem, the flowers of Primrows will grow and bloom all year long and have new challenges to offer.\n\n\n\nIn Decembers monthly challenge, youll unwrap a powerup bonanza. You get three scratches a new mechanic that lets you record a zero on the scorecard and start fresh with a new garden. To earn all three stars, youll need to strategize and figure out when to use your powerups in pursuit of perfection, and when to call for a clean slate instead. The catch? Youll need to put together a perfect prize garden in order to score points a twist that turns the familiar Primrows formula into a resource management challenge.\n\nWeekly challenges will arrive every Monday as well, so come back then to find a new gift! This month youll find new seasonal flowers for Christmas, a brand new board shape, and a special challenge with flowers that arent quite ready to bloom yet.\n

Are you on your last nerve trying to wake up those pesky sleeping flowers? Maybe youve never tasted the sweet rush of dopamine that getting a Prize Garden brings. Nominate Primrows as the Best Game You Suck At!

It feels like fall only just arrived, and yet its already on its way out. Weve prepared a challenge that will help you give the autumn harvest season a proper send-off.\n\n\n\nNovembers monthly challenge tasks you with foraging for a wide variety of flowers. With nine different flowers to score on a standard-sized board, youll need to keep your eyes peeled for the flowers you still need -- it feels a bit like a trek through a forest searching for treasures. In order to earn all three stars on this challenge, youll need to learn some of the subtler strategies about how to tilt the odds to your favor. Dont forget, you can also save water for later rounds, which will come in handy as you try to complete your list!\n\nThere will be more weekly challenges to find as well, so make sure to return to Primrows every Monday! This month weve got a bunch of new seasonal flowers to grow, and you can even continue the foraging theme by looking for lucky mushrooms. \n

Weve added a new Daily Replay feature to help you on your journey to collecting challenge stars! Every day youll have the chance to replay an earlier daily or monthly challenge. This will give newer players the chance to catch up on the leaderboards from our last major update, and long-time fans the chance to pick up the challenges they may have missed the first time around.

• New Daily Replay feature gives you a chance to replay missed challenges

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• Shorter, streamlined tutorial gets new players to the fun parts quicker

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• New weekly and monthly challenges

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• Game remembers scorecard view preferences in landscape mode

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• Fix splash screen flicker when loading game

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• Fix appearance of accessibility outlines when resetting the game

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• Update Unity to address potential security issue

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• Clarified rules text for Prize Rush challenge and the Magic Watering Can rule

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Its spooky season, and its my favorite time of year! Our happy little flowers might not be particularly fearsome, but I think weve come up with a truly frightful challenge that will send chills down your spine!\n\n\n\nOctobers monthly challenge is a larger-than-life 99 board that will challenge even expert gardeners. All the way back when we were playtesting the game, a few players wondered aloud what Primrows might be like played on a full Sudoku-sized 99 board, and we had to play coy because we were saving this treat (or trick?) for them down the road. Try not to be intimidated, remember that you can lock flowers in place as a note to yourself, and take on this monster one step at a time, and youll be surprised at the scores you can get.\n\nWeve got more weekly challenges to hand out as well, so visit Primrows every Monday! This month weve got holiday-themed challenges for Diwali and Halloween, and some challenges that put special obstacles in your garden that youll have to work around.\n\nCan\'t get enough of Primrows? We\'re excited to partner with two talented LGBTQIA+ creators to bring you the Not Thinking Straight bundle! Test your puzzling prowess with Primrows, Katja\'s Abyss Tactics (+ the soundtrack), and Fishtronomy all in one bundle.\nhttps://store.steampowered.com/bundle/59445/Not_Thinking_Straight/

Were tending to our garden by bringing you new challenges, better performance, and a bug-free Primrows experience!

• Smoother transitions between menus and gameplay

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• Streamlined challenges to reduce and memory usage and reduce loading times when switching between main menu and gameplay

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• Added support for additional weekly and monthly challenges

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• Cleaned up several rules cards for existing challenges

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• Bug Fix: fixed visual bug where buttons would appear stuck in the pressed position

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• Bug Fix: fixed rare softlock when returning to main menu

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• Bug Fix: fixed watering and scoring animations on 3x3, 6x6, and 3x6 game boards

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Fall is in the air! September is a time of change, and marks a return to school for many parts of the world. Primrows is getting into the spirit of the season by offering challenges that both switch up regular play and challenge you to learn new techniques.\n\n\n\nGeometry-loving gamers have a long tradition of seeing a game thats played on squares and remixing it into a hexagonal version: chess, checkers, crosswords, dominoes, Scrabble you name it. Primrows joins in the hexagon fun with this months challenge, which is a hexagonal version of the basic journal play. Even a seasoned player will have to learn a whole new set of patterns to put a high score on the board!\n\nAll-new weekly challenges continue to roll out, so make sure to check back every Monday! This month, you can look forward to planting fall fruits, new garden shapes, and even one challenge that changes the basic rules about when flowers grow.\n

Eager to share your gardening prowess with the world? This update brings you a crop of social and competitive features to show off your skills.

Full feature list:

• Added Leaderboard Support

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• Created 10 new achievements

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• Added A snapshot feature for sharing your high-scoring gardens

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• Refined tooltip system to better guide first-time players

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• Let players see scorecard tooltips by hovering with a mouse instead of clicking

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• Renamed archive to replay

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• Added support for additional weekly and monthly challenges

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• Bug Fix: fixed blur effect on backgrounds

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• Bug Fix: cleaned up animations on Hexagonal and 3x3 challenge boards

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• Bug Fix: back button on the gameplay rules card takes you back to the correct spot in the menus

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Primrows has much more to offer beyond the basic modes, and theyre changing constantly so be sure to keep checking in! Every week we bring you a brand new challenge to try your hand at, and at the beginning of each month youll also get a bonus extended-play challenge.\n\n\n\nFor August, weve got a limited-water challenge called Drought -- a nod to late summer in the Midwest, where a lot of our development team has roots. When water becomes scarce, youll need to manage it carefully. Save your water for when youll need it the most! This challenge will reward a player with a good grasp of probability, as youll need to decide whether its worth it to chase after a small improvement, or if youd be doing your garden more good in the long run by saving the water for later.\n\nNew weekly challenges will be sprouting up as well, so make sure to check in every Monday! You can look forward to growing fresh corn on the cob, figuring out how to overcome difficult growing conditions, and more.\n

Now that Primrows has been out for a few months, Id like to share with you some lessons weve learned from watching players post-launch, how those lessons are shaping our ongoing updates, and what we (and other indie developers) can carry forward to the next project.\n\nWe put a lot of hours into playtesting. There was a mix of one-on-one sessions, self-guided play, and interacting with attendees at Midwest Gaming Classic and GDEX as they tried out Primrows. Playtests were focused on two things: onboarding (tutorials, etc.) and challenge balance. We may not have gotten either of those things perfect, but they wouldnt have been anywhere close if not for the contributions from our playtesters.\n\n[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45110161/68e3624901b00929bb42bb989f450fff7d9cde8f.png\"][/img]

Occasionally a playtester would get super lucky on a difficult challenge and throw our whole spreadsheet off. Hopefully the Through the Pavement challenge didnt end up too frustratingly difficult to 3-star!\n\nOne big thing we missed, in part because it can be hard to conduct, was longitudinal playtesting: self-guided playtests that last for a couple weeks or more. These can be useful to see whats drawing people back to the game, and how theyre interacting with the game in general. Without having run those kinds of tests, we were just guessing at what would keep long-term engagement up.\n\nSome of our guesses were right weekly and monthly challenges have been a hit with everyone who has talked to us about the game but other guesses were way off. Perhaps our biggest fumble was the lack of online leaderboard support at launch. Without a proper leaderboard to use to compete, we noticed many players took to sharing screenshots of their final score screen. While were happy that people are sharing, the current score screen doesnt do a great job of showing new players what kind of game Primrows is. Thats why were adding a snapshot feature in our upcoming 1.2 update- to hopefully pique the interests of people who havent tried the game yet\n\n[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45110161/0ba2a6ec9debb6d6078ea68bbaed91c3e0f829dd.png\"][/img] Before [img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45110161/56b074a313cba3faf275e86ba551c66ad8e41a3c.png\"][/img] After \n\nIn addition to adding a snapshot feature, well have full leaderboard support so you can measure your score up against other players around the world and see just how far you can take the game. Many players considered the game beaten after getting 3-star scores in quickplay and journal, rather than being prompted to push their scores to new heights and really dive down into the deeper levels of strategy. Also, youll have achievements to strive for to guide you towards higher-level play.\n\n\nBeat Dad by 5 points -- YAY! Love, Mom\nCathys parents clearly intend to be threats on the leaderboards.steammocking\n\n\n

We have some big news for Primrows, along with some brand new info on what to look forward to with our Monthly and Weekly Challenges!

Press Gay To Play


Primrows has been featured in the 2025 Rainbow Tech Fest showcase: Press Gay To Play! This is our games first ever appearance in a showcase, and we couldnt be more proud. To celebrate, were having a sale here on Steam until the end of the event- June 22!
Click here to watch the stream: https://link.rainbowtechfest.dev/press-gay-to-play-youtube-reshowcase-premier

Challenges for June

Now that Primrows has released,we can show you the Monthly Challenges weve been excited to share as they come out! Discover more about our June challenge, along with some Weekly Challenge teasers for the month.

How long can you last in this water management endurance challenge? High scores reward you with longer play time in Endless Survival, adding a strategic twist to your gardening. Unlike regular play, theres no round limit. The game will continue until you run out of water, and its up to you whether you prune flowers to try for a higher score (and a bigger reward) or if you take what you get and hope for the best with your next garden.


Play Junes challenge while its here! July will bring with it a new weather-themed challenge that we hope you will enjoy. And every Monday, you can look forward to a fun weekly challenge. Over the next few weeks, you can look forward to growing special flowers for bonus points and playing on a brand new board shape.

Weve been tending to our garden to bring you the best possible experience! This patch fixes some bugs, adds some quality of life fixes, and expands support for ongoing challenges.

• Added support for upcoming weekly and monthly challenges

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• Hovering over a score category while playing with a mouse now brings up the tooltip for that row, even when scoring is not currently enabled

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• Tooltips have been reworked to provide better guidance to new players

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• Tile highlights appear for challenges with drag-and-drop flowers to assist players using a Steam Deck or other touch screen

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• Bug fix: score header no longer shows the wrong round number during score animations

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• Bug fix: scorecard will not let you record a second score while the score animation is playing out

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• Bug fix: glitchy scoring animations on certain challenge boards have been cleaned up

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• Bug fix: text overflow issues and overlapping flower tooltip emoji have been addressed

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• Bug fix: new badge on Challenges button now correctly appears when a new challenge is available

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• Added clarifying text to some weekly and monthly challenges

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Were still at work with additional improvements on the way, so if you have any bug reports or quality-of-life feature requests, please reach out to us on the official [u]Primrows Discord [/u].

The core strategy of Primrows comes from pattern matching. There are four basic patterns that let you place four of the same flower without any two being in the same row, column, or quadrant, and if you want to aim for high scores, youll want to get familiar with them. Weve given them nicknames to help you recognize them.

The Pinwheel:


The Bolt:


The Mountain:


The Corner:


If youre trying for the elusive Prize Garden, figure out the ways that these patterns can link together with each other. There are several ways to do thisdont forget that you can flip and rotate these patterns, too. Heres an example that uses one pinwheel, one bolt, and two (sideways) mountains:


Making Your Own Luck

Once youve got a grasp on the patterns, you can use them to make decisions about the chance elements of the game. Lets look at an example from Journal Play. Youve just watered your garden, and youve grown these flowers:

There are two basic strategies you can take here. The most obvious one is to look at the three happy one-petal blue flowers and try to complete the pinwheel pattern, pruning like so:


And if youre down to your last water, this is the smartest move you can make. Even though your odds of getting a fourth blue flower are a bit of a long-shot, youre guaranteed at least 30 points because youre not doing anything to risk those happy blue flowers.

However if you have two water left, theres a better move on the board: trimming away three of those sleeping four-petal orange flowers to reveal the already-complete corner pattern.


Its a bigger risk, because you arent guaranteed any points this way. But if you sit down and crunch the numbers, thenas long as youre not on your last waterthis is going to be the higher-scoring strategy in the long run.

There are, of course, endless wrinkles to the specifics of the strategy, especially in a situation where there arent just two clear options to pick from. Trying to calculate the perfect strategy for any given garden quickly becomes a headache, but you can get a pretty high score relying on vibes. Just remember, trying to complete a partial pattern is the safe-and-steady option, and trying to trim away extra flowers from a complete pattern is the high-risk/high-reward option.

Grab your gardening gloves and play Primrows today!

Join Cathy, Susan, and Kitt, three of the people behind Primrows, as we introduce you to the game, show you how to play, and answer some of the questions collected from our social media followers and Discord server. (Originally broadcast during Steam Next Fest fall 2024)

Break out your gardening gloves, because Primrows is launching April 17th!

Finding the Magic Touch

In our January update , we talked about how tactile gameplay is important to Primrows and to the Tursiops brand as a whole. This month, lets dig deep into the process of how different creative roles worked together to build a satisfying tactile feel as you prune flowers in Primrows

[b]Art
[/b]
One of the first stylistic choices we had to make for Primrows was what the flowers should look like. We settled on a style based on shapes that could exist as physical objects in a board game -- although we havent realized our dream of making a premium custom-cut wooden Primrows pieces, this choice has made it easy to make these little die-cut cardstock flowers that we bring to our conventions.


Although we decided against showing three-dimensional thickness in the flower artwork in-game, our artist Susan added some nice shading to sell the tactile quality of the flowers, and the hints of a shadow behind them to give them a bit more dimension compared to a minimalist or cartoon-like art style.


Sound

As pruning is the one thing in Primrows youll be doing more than anything else, we needed to sell the effect with some good sound effects. We went with a thunky cutting sound , something with a bit of volume to it, to make it feel like you were clipping through plant matter and not just snipping paper. And our sound designer Valerii made sure to include multiple samples and vary the audio a bit each time you pruned, for a more organic and less repetitive feel.

As a side note, trying to find the words to convey to a sound designer what kind of sound youre looking for is the source of some of the most amusing design conversations you can have while developing a game.

Animation

Once the sounds were in place, we realized the sounds felt a bit naked without an animation to accompany them. We had a strictly functional animation of the pieces coming off the board, but that didnt feel like enough. We asked our animator Jin to give the pruning action an animation that matched the sound, and she came up with this little bit: a bit of a quick outward motion to give it all a responsive feel, with a gentler follow-through as the leaves slowly fell back to the board.


[b]
UI[/b]

All of our visuals and sounds make for a satisfying experience for players, but theyll only work if the game elements respond in the way that players expect them to. For mouse users, this is straightforward enough but for players who want to take tactile experience literally, we needed to put in some extra work.


Not only has our developer Cathy been testing regularly both on her Steam Deck and on an old Surface Pro 3 to make sure the touchscreen experience works and feels right, but we noticed something interesting while playtesting: some players would really get into the roleplay of the situation and would swipe the flowers off of their spaces to remove them, instead of just tapping. A little bit of custom mouse input logic was the finishing touch to get the feel of pruning just right.

As we get closer to release, were all hard at work making sure that everything is all polished up and ready to go! Heres a peek at some of the things weve added during the final stretch!

Thems the Rules

Weekly challenges mix up the rules of the game in new and interesting ways. Every time you try one, youll get a little quick reference page where you can learn the rules of the challenge and keep track of your best scores. Our artist Susan has been busy making sure all of the rules have cute little icons that will help you understand the rules at a glance.


Prize Garden Celebrations

Getting a perfect prize garden is a rare event, so we decided to give it a bit of extra fanfare whenever you managed to score one. Our animator Jin brought this floral flourish to life to celebrate your achievement!


Play Everywhere

Our coders and our (very patient) QA have been ironing out some wrinkles with cloud saves, so that youll be able to play Primrows from home and on the go and not lose any of your progress.

If youve been following our team for a while, you might be familiar with our last project, The Day We Fought Space!. Its a fast-paced game about making spaceships slam into other spaceships with an escalating array of absurd weaponry. At a glance, you might think its the furthest possible thing from a cozy little game about doing sudoku so well that it makes flowers bloom.


That game had expressive plants, too, but they NEVER smiled. Not even once.

Despite the difference in town theres an important aesthetic similarity running through the core of both games: these are both games meant to invoke and appeal to your sense of touch.

On one level, its literally about touch: touch input and gestures were an important part of the experience for The Day We Fought Space, and weve designed Primrows from day one with touch-friendly controls that you can enjoy on a touchscreen device like a Steam Deck or a Surface.

At a deeper level, its about the tactile experiences that our art and sound design are meant to evoke. Both games opt for a more handcrafted, painterly look meant to invoke experiences the audience might have once held in their hands. For The Day We Fought Space, we wanted players to feel like they were holding a playable comic book in their hands.


For Primrows, board games filled that role. The flower pieces are designed with shapes that look like they might have been wooden game tiles, the backgrounds would not look out of place on the background of a premium European board game, and even the quick reference card in the game rules evokes classic board game iconography.


The sound design was crafted to elevate the tactile vibes of the game and reinforce the fictional board game concept. Pruning flowers is accompanied by satisfying thunky clipping sounds, and the water animation is accompanied not only by a splash of water but by the sound of rolling dice.

While we dont have any real-world Primrows board game pieces to play with, we do hope that all of these secondary cues will make it easy to imagine yourself moving flower-shaped tokens on a physical game board!

Its winter in Primrows!

Primrows has two main play modes: quickplay and journal play. If you tried out our demo during Steam Next Fest, or met us in-person at GDEX, quickplay was the first thing you were introduced to, but it wasnt the first thing we developed.

The first mode we madethe only mode that existed in the classic 2010 versionwas journal play.


We love journal play, but it caused a lot of issues with onboarding. So for the remake, we set out to add a quickplay mode with three goals in mind:

Easier to learn

Quicker to play

Stands on its own

Accessibility settings are great, but you know whats one step better? When accessibility is always on, baked into the design of a game from the start. Nobody wants to have to stop the tutorial during the first step to go frantically searching for accessibility features.

Since the flowers are the most important elements of the Primrows game board, our goal from the beginning was to come up with a set of flowers whose colors and shapes would remain distinct for as wide a range of vision accessibility needs as possible.

But Ive already gotten ahead of myself here, because the choice to use flowers was in itself an accessibility choice.

Heres a re-creation of the very first prototype for the game that would evolve into Primrows 2010, which leaned heavily on the games Sudoku roots:


A perfectly utilitarian option, but beyond just lacking character, it demands a certain level of literacy. And even though you arent doing any actual calculations with these numbers in Primrows (or in Sudoku, for that matter), a lot of people with discalculia or a general aversion to math find this style to be its own barrier to entry. Abandoning this design turned out to be the right call for several reasons.

(And for those people who do find numbers to be the best way to distinguish the different flowers, we incorporated the numbers one through five in the design of the flowers. Can you spot them?)

Since we knew relying on color alone to distinguish flowers wasnt going to be an option, Susan made sure all the shapes of the flower had as much shape contrast as possible -- some tall, some wide, some round, some pointy. Among other things, the suits of a deck of playing cards served as a bit of inspiration.


During this phase, Cathy spent a good amount of time looking at her monitor with her glasses off at various distances and once we had a final design, we made sure to seek out playtesters with low vision to check our work.


Choosing the colors took a lot of effort, and we spent a lot of time looking at different color options in color blindness simulators to try and find a set of colors that had contrast across a wide range of color vision deficiencies, while still maintaining stylistic consistency. On the left is an early color palette, and on the right is the revised version that made it into the final version.


Of course, simulators are no substitute for testing accessibility with real humans, so we made efforts to recruit playtesters with various types of colorblindness. These tests are what revealed to us that, while players were able to distinguish the different types of flower from each other, there were some issues distinguishing the flowers from the game board, and we needed at least a little bit of a shadow behind the flowers to help players out.


In addition to what weve done with the flowers, weve also been using tools to ensure our UI elements meet minimum contrast requirements -- and I havent even touched on the things we took into consideration for motor accessibility, or the way every sound in the game has a companion animation cue.

We do hope our efforts have contributed to a game that most people will be able to enjoy!

Join Cathy, Susan, and Kitt, three of the people behind Primrows, for our special developer stream for Steam Next Fest!

We'll be introducing you to the world of Primrows, showing you how to play, and answering some of the questions collected from our social media followers and Discord server.

Primrows isnt a match-three. In fact, some of our playtesters described it as the opposite of a match-three. But lets be honest with ourselves: to someone window-shopping through the Steam Store, the game looks like it might be a match-three at a glance. Colorful shapes on a grid? Seems to fit the pattern, right? Because of this surface-level similarity, we wanted to make sure that this game would appeal to the kind of audience that loves that sort of game.

To explain how we approached this challenge, let me first introduce the stars of Primrows: the flowers!


Sometimes theyre happy, sometimes theyre sleepy, sometimes theyre a little bit startled. These emotions arent just there to liven up the mood, they convey important hints to the player!

When you first plant a garden, every flower will either be happy or sleepy. Happy flowers score, sleepy flowers dont.


The emotion in between the two the perked up state provides key feedback during the next step.

Once youve grown your garden, you get two chances to prune your garden to grow more happy flowers. Even though the rules are simple to explain flowers are happy when they are one-of-a-kind in their row, column, and quadrant they take time for new players to really get used to.


Without the surprised emotion, this is what the board would look like after a bit of pruning.

Its harder to tell whether or not your decisions were good until theyre already locked in, and its too late to make any changes. Whats more, since flowers are chosen at random whenever they grow, you arent necessarily guaranteed a reward just because you made a smart move.

In this state, Primrows would play with the pacing of a board game. This would be fine for a board game, but the sort of players drawn to games made up of a grid of colorful shapes typically come to the table expecting more immediate feedback.

To provide this feedback, we introduced the middle-ground perked up expression. These are the flowers that might be happy the next time you grow flowers, depending on the roll of the dice. It highlights exactly what youre risking, and what you stand to gain.


With the perked up state, now you know at a glance that the purple flower in the left is safe, all three of the blue flowers have woken up and might score once new flowers grow in the empty spaces, and none of the light cyan flowers have any potential to score. Also, the happy yellow and pink flowers are at risk.

Importantly, you get all of this feedback before youve locked in your decisions by watering the garden again to make new flowers grow. If you want to take a less risky or more aggressive strategy, youve got time to prune and unprune.

The original Primrows came out almost fifteen years ago, and in that time weve grown as a studio and our standards have grown along with us. We chose to do a full remake of the game from the ground up to deliver a game that could show off how much weve grown in that time. Lets take a quick tour of how things have changed since 2010!

Flowers

Backgrounds

Holidays