Kodama: The Tree Spirits is one of my favorite family games, still one my daughter will ask to play years after we first got it, because it’s the rare game that’s appropriately competitive but also fun to play: The action you take on each turn, adding branch cards to grow your tree, is its own end, with a subjective component and the point-scoring aspect that forms the heart of the game. The base game has enough cards for anywhere from two to five players to play at one time, and in our experience plays as well with two as it does with higher player counts.
I was a bit surprised to see the designers had come out with a two-player version, Kodama Duo, but still gave it a whirl since the original is such a favorite for us. Duo does have a few rules tweaks that change the game for two players and make it a little harder, although I think the net result of the alterations is not positive – I prefer the original. However, the Duo box also includes enough additional cards for you to add a sixth player to the original game, which may be worth the cost by itself if you have enough kids around to get to six players.
I reviewed the original Kodama for Paste back in January 2017; click over there if you want a review of the base game’s details. The main difference in Duo comes to card selection. The game still has twelve turns in three seasons, but this time, you have to jump through a hoop before either of you gets a card to play. One player, the Chooser, draws the top three cards from the deck at the start of a turn. The other player, the Splitter, divides the three cards into two sets, one with two cards and the other with the remaining card. The Chooser then picks one of those two options, while the Splitter gets the other choice.
The player who ended up with two cards may only play one of the two to their tree, discarding the other card. The opposing player plays the one card they received, and then gets to take a Spirit token representing one of the game’s six features (where you get all your points in the game), using it to cover up any single feature already on their tree. You can only take a token if that feature was shown on the card your opponent discarded. At the start of the game, the six Spirit tokens are in the general supply, but they’ll eventually all end up on the two players’ trees, so when you select a token, you ‘ll take it from your opponent’s tree or relocate it on your own. (The rules are not well written around this, but the designers confirmed you can ‘take’ a token from your own tree and put it somewhere else.)
I think this rule is here because with just two players, there’s so much choice of cards in the base game that it might seem insufficiently challenging for two. Duo comes with exactly 36 cards, so you will draw them all over the course of a single game; thirty of them look like cards from the original, and there are also six single-feature cards, with exactly two instances of one of the game’s six features. But this isn’t an improvement over the original, and the idea of “splitting” three into two and one is … it felt silly, to be kind. I would have been much happier to just draw two cards each turn and alternate who picked first.
There are also different decree cards, which add a new wrinkle for four turns (one season), in Duo, and they don’t quite work the same way as in the base game, since most of them seem to rely on the spirit tokens or change how you split the cards (for example, one of the three cards is face-down to the Chooser until they choose). The decree cards are a big part of the appeal of the base game, so it was a shame that they worked so much worse here.
Duo does include additional cards and new decree cards that can only be played with the base game (marked 3-6 to distinguish them from the two-player decrees), which then allow you to expand the original to six players. Given the lack of added value in the pure two-player variant, I’d say get Duo if you want to play Kodama with six, but otherwise pass on it.