→ October 9, 2024
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Applejack.

Applejack comes from Uwe Rosenberg, known for his heavy worker placement games and his light tile-laying games, although I think it’s been a few years since he had a real ‘hit’ – probably 2020’s tile-layer New York Zoo. Applejack came out in 2023 and it’s a perfectly fine game that suffers from an overwrought final scoring mechanic, so while I think it’s good enough to recommend, it’s not one I’ll come back to very often.

In Applejack, players will draft hexagonal tiles to fill out their meadow to attract the most bees and grow the most apples of seven different varieties. Each tile has up to four apples on it, possibly some flowers, and honey pots with numbers from 2 to 10 on at least one of the six edges. There’s a central board with a spiral track, and as the round-marker die moves, it will offer you your choices of the tiles in the bucket ahead of it and the bucket behind it (located around the outside of the board). You can place the tile anywhere on your personal board; if you line up an edge with a honey pot next to another edge with a honey pot, either on another tile or on the outer frame of your board, you get coins (honey) equal to the lower of those two values. That matters because you have to pay coins for the tile you draft, with the cost equal to the value of its honey pot(s). If you can’t pay, you must flip the tile over and place it face-down, with no apples, flowers, or honey pots showing.

The general goal is to place tiles to create chains of apple varieties; as the round marker moves, it will score the different varieties one or two at a time, giving each player coins equal to the number of tiles in the longest chain of that variety minus the current round number. Flowers score one coin apiece at the end of the first round, two apiece at the end of the second.

About halfway through round three, all players will have filled their boards and the game ends. You then score each apple variety again, subtracting three for the current round number, and double that number – effectively scoring them twice. Then there’s a bonus for the number of apple varieties you scored in that last harvest, starting with 4 coins for 4 varieties up to 35 points if you scored all 7. And flowers score again, but this time it’s back to just one coin per flower. Whoever has the most coins wins.

The actual game play, meaning the tile selection and placement, is good. I’d even argue that it’s all good until the final scoring, and then it gets annoying. It’s a lot of arithmetic, and it takes a while, but that also means that it’s hard to do the mental math during the game to fully anticipate how it’ll play out. Building the chains is fun, as is the challenge near the end of the game when you only have a couple of spaces left for tiles and have to choose which varieties’ chains to sacrifice and which to expand. I understand the philosophical decision to double the chains’ scoring at the end, because otherwise you’d end with players potentially gaining fewer points in the end game than they did in the second scoring, but it makes the process clunkier than it needs to be. Maybe Rosenberg tried it without subtracting the round number and it didn’t work; that seems like a more obvious way to score, at least. And I think the flowers are just kind of there – the points are nice but they’re so small in relation to the rest of the scoring that you’re not likely to pay much attention to them.

That’s a lot of words on what’s wrong with Applejack, but I’m being a little harsh – it’s really a solid game other than the scoring, and it’s possible that 1) the scoring won’t bug you like it did me or 2) you’ll just house-rule it and score it differently. I will say that among Rosenberg’s tile-laying games, though, this is below Patchwork, Sagani (also known as Nova Luna and Framework), and New York Zoo for me, so if you’re interested in this mechanic you might want to check those out first.

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→ September 27, 2024
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Undergrove.

Elizabeth Hargrave has already cemented her place in board game history thanks to her design of Wingspan and her choice to devote much of her time and energy to promoting diverse voices in the space, notably women designers. She followed it up with The Fox Experiment, a completely different sort of game other than the two games’ shared basis in real science, and now is back with another science-themed game, Undergrove.

Hargrave’s name on any game box is going to get reactions, pro and con; the board gaming space has its share of incels and other misogynists who seem to rush to savage her games on Boardgamegeek and elsewhere, while I think she also has the benefit of being one of the few designers who even some casual gamers might know by name. I know I’m predisposed to like anything Hargrave does, certainly, because of her past designs and because I’ve had many positive interactions with her over the last five years.

So when it comes to her newest game, Undergrove, I have had a very hard time deciding what I really think of the design. There’s no question the game itself works well – it looks great, feels thoroughly playtested, isn’t too hard to learn, and seems balanced. If someone breaks it out, I’m going to be happy to play it. I’m just not sold that it’s fun enough for me to want to play it regularly.

Undergrove is built around the symbiotic relationship between trees and the fungi that live in the ground around them. Players have a collection of tokens to represent seedlings, trees, and roots, and will play them to the vertices on the shared board they’ll build, where the tiles are fungi that belong to the forest as a whole. You’re managing five basic resources in water, carbon, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, with the last four represented by their atomic symbols on the board, and will use the carbon cycle to continually trade up through those resources to allow you to take the game’s main actions – placing mushroom tiles, planting seedlings, growing roots, and soaking up carbon through those roots to grow your trees.

There are five primary actions in the game, one of which you can always take while the others tend to require you to have something first. There are also four major mushroom types, represented by tokens on each player board; when you take the first action, Activate, you pick a mushroom tile where you have at least one root, then flip the matching token to its used side, which means you can’t activate a mushroom of that type again until you do something to refresh the token. To Activate a mushroom, you pay the carbon cost shown on the tile, then pay whatever other resources are shown to activate its ability. These can include getting different resources in exchange, soaking carbon up into your trees (as in the Absorb action), or copying the ability of another mushroom. Some mushrooms can’t be activated but give you ongoing powers for the rest of the game once you have a single root on them. All mushrooms have victory points you get at game-end for each root you have on them, with a few mushrooms showing a variable victory point value that’s tied to how often it was activated.

The Absorb action lets you bring carbon from connected mushrooms into your seedlings, which is how they grow; once a seedling has taken in 3 carbon, it becomes a tree, and then can’t grow any more. A tree scores for all four of its roots at game end, whereas a seedling only scores for one root per carbon token. The Reproduce action lets you place a seedling and one root at any unoccupied vertex, and optionally to place a mushroom tile. The Partner action lets you place two roots from your supply from one or two of your seedlings/trees on to adjacent mushrooms; you may also choose to play a mushroom tile from your hand to the table. The fifth action, Photosynthesize, allows you to refresh all of your mushroom tokens, and to take two carbon cubes, plus optionally to trade nitrogen for carbon.

If all this sounds a bit … well, educational, it feels that way too. The problem I keep facing with Undergrove is that the actions feel pretty rote, and as a result, the game is lacking the joy of a really great design – never mind Wingspan, since that’s a totally different sort of game to me, but even to other resource management games where you’re gathering resources and trading them up either to build things or to get more of other resource types. I suspect that there was a tradeoff between lighter or freer gameplay and authenticity to the underlying science, which is something I’ve noticed in games explicitly designed to teach a science topic, like Cytosis and Cellulose (both very solid games, but a bit dry to play).

You can definitely get a little engine going in Undergrove, as the game rewards you for cycling through the various actions as efficiently as possible. There are some end-game objectives, and there’s a carbon track that you move up every time you absorb carbon through any means, giving you rewards while also serving as the game’s internal clock. Once any player reaches the top, they get to choose a bonus (probably the two point token) and the game enters its final round. That gives you more things to shoot for as you play so there’s something a bit more than just, well, breathe in (nitrogen), breathe out (carbon).

I’m afraid this game just missed the mark for me on some hard to define criterion. I think in the end I felt too constrained in my choices, though; the next turn’s action was always obvious, and often it was the only viable option. Maybe that was ultimately what made Undergrove fall a little short, despite the tight design, the balance, the fantastic artwork, and clever flourishes like the little boxes to hold your seedlings and roots and trees: I’d rather have more latitude in my actions, even if it means I might take some bad ones, than to have fewer options, or even just one.

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→ September 16, 2024
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Life in Reterra.

The earth has been devastated by some sort of apocalypse – take your pick, there are just so many options to choose from. Now it’s up to you to try to rebuild your part of the planet, with enough diversity in your terrains to help all species grow, attracting inhabitants and even constructing some basic buildings to get civilization back on track.

Such is the backdrop for Life in Reterra, a new family-level game from designers Eric M. Lang (best known for heavier games like Blood Rage and Ankh) and Ken Gruhl (Cahoots, Happy Salmon, and the underrated Mystic Market) that draws heavily from Kingdomino but offers a ton of replayability because you can change the scoring. It’s a strong filler game, definitely one to play with the kids, that can move very quickly because turns are so simple and most of the complexity within the game is in the scoring at the end.

Players in Life in Reterra – by the way, I’m embarrassed at how long it took me to realize what “Reterra” meant – will build a 4×4 tableau of square tiles, each of which is divided itself into a 2×2 square of one to four terrain types. Some squares have relic symbols on them, which are worth a single point each if still visible at game end. Some squares have gears, which you can cover immediately with an inhabitant meeple for another point at game end, or you can leave open to try to create a pattern of two to four connected gears that you can cover with a building.

The turns are extremely short: on your turn, you either take a tile from the market or use one of the three tiles you were dealt at the start of the game, placing it on your tableau. You place inhabitants on any gears, if you want, or a building if you have the right configuration of gears. That’s it. Go around the table 15 times and the game’s over. I can see why BGG lists a play time of 35 minutes for it – if everyone’s engaged, you can rip through this game really quickly, and usually you can figure out your turn a player or two before it gets to you.

The buildings are the heart of the game, and the best aspect of Life in Reterra is that they’re flexible: The game comes with three sets of building tiles, with five buildings per set, and each building has a double-sided card with slightly different scoring. There’s a recommended beginning building set, but you can mix and match as you see fit, so if my math is correct there are 7776 combinations just in this base game. Some may not necessarily work that well, so the rulebook recommends a few combinations to get you started. Most buildings give you a few base victory points, but they have additional powers that range from sticking a junk token on another player’s relic space (turning it from +1 points to -1 at game end) to giving you one extra inhabitant per turn until all buildings on that terrain area are full to giving you one point per square in your largest contiguous area of one terrain type.

The game-end scoring is where it gets tricky enough that you’ll need an older player to take over. Inhabitants, relics, and buildings score as described above, with the buildings scoring their base value plus a variable bonus for some building types. For every contiguous area of a single terrain type that covers at least 7 squares, you get three more points. There are also special “energy source” tiles that score 8 points each, but only if they’re completely surrounded by other tiles – that is, they have to be in the 2×2 square in the middle of your 4×4 tableau. Counting squares and then moving building pieces aside to ensure they’re counted correctly is where this requires a little experience in dealing with board game scoring mechanics.

If the game only came with one set of buildings/scoring cards, I think I’d get tired of it quickly, just as I got tired of Kingdomino quickly. (Then again, Queendomino added a bunch of new scoring mechanisms, and that game sucked.) I’m more intrigued because there are so many ways to mix up the cards and get a game that’s more or less competitive, or that rewards more or less diversity in terrains, and so on. It’s a strong family-level game, probably not something I’d break out for a game night group but a good one for kids who have reached the point where they can play ‘adult’ games. (My guess is this will be on the bubble for my best-of-2024 list – it’s turning out to be a very strong year for new board games.)

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→ February 19, 2021
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Calico.

Calico is a deceptively cute game, ostensibly a simple game about cats and quilts but in fact a much deeper strategic experience that asks you to plan every tile and think about every move. It would have made my top 10 last year had I seen and played the game in time to write it. It’s between printings right now, but its amazon page is still active.

Calico is a tile-laying game where each player gets a board that has a frame around it showing pieces of hexagonal quilt tiles, and three scoring hex tiles placed on the three designated spots on their boards, each showing a specific scoring method associated with it, such as AA-BB-CC (three pairs) or AAA-BB-C (a triple, a pair, and a singleton). Over the course of the game, players will draw tiles from the supply and place them on their boards to try to surround those scoring hexes with six quilt tiles of different colors and patterns to meet those scoring tiles’ requirements. The tiles come in six colors and six patterns. If you meet the scoring tiles’ rules in just color or pattern, you score the lower number, but if you meet it in color and pattern, you score more.

There are also cats in this game, three each time you play, who are looking around to lay on your quilt, but only if it matches the patterns they like in specific alignments of tiles. That can mean something as simple as three tiles in a row, or something more complicated like five tiles in two rows (a row of two and a row of three, forming a sort of trapezoid), or a chain of seven contiguous tiles in any shape. Cats only score based on tile patterns, not colors – the latter are immaterial – and in each game, you’ll get one easy cat to score, one moderate one, and one difficult one, with multiple options for each at the start of every game; they score 3, 5, and 7 points respectively. You can count the partial tiles in the frame towards these patterns.

And there are buttons, which you can get by placing three tiles of the same color together, either in a row or in a triangle, and once again you can count the frame’s partial tiles to create those trios. You can’t create a group of six for two buttons, however; each group of three has to be separate. There are six colors of buttons, and if you collect one of all six colors, you get a bonus rainbow button. They’re all worth 3 points apiece.

You start the game with two random tiles from the supply, and on each turn, you’ll place one of them on your board, then replace with one of the three tiles in the supply. The game proceeds until all players have filled their boards, at which point they score their points from the scoring hex tiles, their cats, and their buttons.

That’s as detailed a description of Calico’s rules as I can give, and it’s not even 500 words. It’s an extremely elegant game that you can learn in a few minutes, but the game changes each time you play depending on the hex tiles, the cats, and the random draws of quilt tiles from the bag to supply the market. The first two options can be random, but you can also use them to fine-tune the game to the difficulty level you want; the rulebook suggests a starter game with specific tiles and cats for first-time players, which I think is also useful for learning the game’s icons and symbols.

The one drawback to game play is that you’re limited to the tiles that appear on the table, and, with only three tiles of each specific color/pattern combination and 108 tiles in total, you can easily find yourself waiting for a tile that never comes. You have to play in a way that allows you to capitalize if you get the tiles you want but prepares you for the more likely outcome that you get some of what you need, and even so, you can still lose just because the right tile never appeared. That randomness can also help level out the playing field between older and younger players, or more experienced players and newer ones, and in this case I’d say the randomness is in service of the game’s larger goals rather than just being there for its own sake.

The art in Calico is cute, maybe a little over the top in that regard, but artist Beth Sobel is one of the best in the business, with Wingspan, Lanterns, and the new edition of Arboretum all to her credit. Those cats on the scoring tiles are, in fact, actual cats, and they get their own bio section in the back of the rulebook, if you care about such things. Ultimately I’m swayed by the combination of easy-to-learn rules, subtle strategy, and replayability, though, all of which make Calico (belatedly) one of the best new games of 2020.

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→ April 30, 2020
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Gingerbread House.

Phil Walker-Harding is probably my favorite game designer right now, one of the only names that would get me to buy a game just because I saw it on the box. Silver & Gold was my #2 game of 2019, and Imhotep the Duel was #6. Gizmos made my top ten for 2018. Cacao remains a favorite, and I think his Sushi Go! Party is one of the best games for 5+ players. Imhotep itself was nominated for the Spiel des Jahres. I’ve never played a PWH game I didn’t like, and still have one unplayed game of his (the first Adventure game).

Gingerbread House came out in 2018-19, and I think it’s slipped a bit through the cracks because he’s released several better games in the last two years that overshadowed it. I suspect the goofy theme and art might lead people to think it’s a simpler game than it is, although Broom Service had very similar art and that’s definitely more complex than this game is.

Gingerbread House is like a kicked-up Kingdomino, or a better reimagining of Kingdomino than Queendomino is, asking you to place two-square tiles on your 3×3 house card to gain tokens based on what you cover up. You’ll then collect those tokens and use them to buy points cards, while also gaining up to three bonus cards for each level you complete. There are specific twists to the rules beyond that, but that’s the framework of the game – you place one tile on each turn, collect two things (or maybe three), and then buy a card if you can.

There are four colors of tokens in Gingerbread House, and the cards you buy, which represent humans and monsters you’re trying to ‘trap’ by enticing them to your house, can require as many as eight tokens and can require tokens of just one color or up to all four. You’ll cover two spaces on each turn and take tokens matching those spaces, although if you cover two spaces showing the same symbol, you get a third one as a bonus. There are other spaces that give you an extra stairway (see below), or let you swap one token for another one, or let you reserve a card to try to pay for it later.

If you’re mathematically inclined, you probably caught on to the fact that you can’t cover a 3×3 grid with two-square tiles. You start the game with one ‘stairway’ file, which is a square ring that allows you to see what’s beneath it. You can place that for free at any time, but you must cover it with a regular tile on the same turn. You also get a one-square wild tile whenever you pay for a card, and must place it immediately, taking whatever token or symbol you’ve covered; if you later cover the wild tile, you can take any color token or treat it as if it were any of the other three symbols.

When you complete a level of your house, you get to take a bonus card that’s worth points at the end of the game. In the basic game, you just take the highest-points card still on the table. In the advanced game, however, you choose one of the bonus cards, which are dealt out at random at the start of each game, and can thus tailor your strategy afterwards to maximize the points you get from the cards you obtain. Individual character cards are worth 4 to 10 points, but bonus cards can be worth as much as 12 points, so if you play your cards correctly (pun intended), you can gain the equivalent of another character card or more from each bonus card. There are some bonus cards that only give you two points, but instead reward you with tokens based on what’s visible on your board at the time you take them.

That interplay between bonus cards and character cards is what makes Gingerbread House more than just a basic family game. You could certainly ditch the bonus cards and play with younger kids, but the bonus cards are what make this fun for adults. What Gingerbread House lacks is any real interaction between players. Unless two of you are gunning for the same card, and maybe one of you uses the ‘cage’ symbol to reserve it, you’re mostly working on your own. That’s fine – Gizmos is like that, Silver & Gold is like that, Bärenpark is definitely like that – and the game is fun enough for a couple of plays, but I don’t know that this has the same huge replay value as his better games.

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→ September 19, 2018
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Founders of Gloomhaven.

If you go over to Boardgamegeek.com and browse their enormous database of games (over 100,000 and always growing), you’ll see the #1 game is something called Gloomhaven, a mammoth, $140 game that, in my personal opinion, isn’t actually a board game: It’s a role-playing/miniatures game that comes in a board game sort of box, but isn’t something the average person would consider a regular tabletop board game. It’s expensive, huge (the box weighs 20 pounds), and requires playing over many sessions, while borrowing heavily from the mechanics of RPGs. It may be great, but that’s not a board game to me, or, I think, to most of my readers.

The designer of Gloomhaven, Isaac Childres, has extended the brand by developing a true tabletop game in the same universe as his hit title, one that is also still complex but plays very much like a regular, heavy strategy game, and manages to introduce some clever tweaks that produce a novel playing experience. This new title, Founders of Gloomhaven, somewhat de-emphasizes the Gloomhaven part – the title on the box has Founders in huge letters and puts the “of Gloomhaven” part in a tiny font that’s easy to overlook – but still comes with a million pieces and an elaborate set of rules and mechanics to satisfy the hardcore gamers in your group. The rules are not well written or organized, unfortunately, and my first playthrough was marred by a lack of understanding of the real point of the game, along with questions we had to head online to answer, but at least when I tried the game a second time I knew what my goal was and what basic actions were required to get me there.

Founders of Gloomhaven is a game of hand management and pickup-and-delivery mechanics that also works in tile placement, route-building, worker placement, a technology tree, and some basic economic elements, so … yeah, there’s a lot going on here. Each player controls two or three of the eight basic resources at the start of the game, and players will build resource production tiles of their own while also paying to get ‘access’ to the resources owned by other players so that they can build better buildings that require delivery of those resources. Eventually, larger “prestige buildings” will appear on the board, and players will earn larger point totals by delivering resources to those while also creating new actions for players to use with their workers.

The real core of the game is in how you connect these resource buildings to the upgraded buildings, which produce level 2 and level 3 resources, and to the prestige buildings, using roads, bridges, and gates. There are ornate rules about where you can place buildings – primarily that you can’t just place new tiles next to your own tiles already on the board – and you must use those connector tiles to create uninterrupted paths from the resources’ origins to their destinations. That means you will often want to forego certain actions or income to place more roads and thus create multiple paths to ship your goods around the board, especially if your competitors might have their own resource production buildings they’re trying to connect to the same destinations.

On a turn, you play one of the five action cards from your hand (six in a two-player game, with a card to collect Income added to the hand) to the table, take its main action, and then let other players take a similar but lesser ‘follow’ action. These include Construct, where you build a personal building like a house (freeing up a worker meeple), a bridge or a gate; Recruit, where you pay one or two coins to add an adviser card to your hand, giving you an upgraded version of one of the five basic actions; Upgrade, which lets you build an advanced resource building for either 4 or 6 coins, as long as you can deliver the required goods to it; Trade, which lets you place resource stalls on the board or pay to get access to someone else’s; and Call to Vote, which triggers a vote on the next prestige building to enter play, gives you some income or road tiles or influence tokens while paying more income to all other players. Your income increases as you bring more resources on to the board, so the game has an incentive built into the rules to keep the board growing and the pace moving along, although money is scarce within the game and you’ll make tough choices every round on what to do. (I rarely build houses, even though I’d get more worker meeples from them, because they’re pricey and I don’t think they pay off as well as upgrades do.) You can also use a card from your hand to take a basic action, like taking one coin, placing one road, or moving a worker to an open space.

Each player also plays as a unique race that owns one specific resource and that has a worker placement space on the main board for the player to use once s/he has built at least one house. The choice of race affects what other basic resources you can own at the start of the game, but beyond that doesn’t seem to have much effect on game play.

The points awarded for delivering resources don’t strictly go to the player who delivered each specific resource, which is one of the most important and most confusing aspects of the rules of Founders. If you deliver leather to a prestige building that rewards 4 points for that delivery, for example, but your leather production building took hides from someone else’s trade stall, you would have to give one point to the other player and keep just 3 for yourself. This means there’s a lot of accounting to do each time there’s a resource delivery, and it’s probably the biggest factor in increasing game time, because as the board fills up, placing any upgraded building or prestige building will likely result in a pause to figure out who gets how many points.

The game ends once six prestige buildings are on the board and completed, meaning someone has delivered each resource required by that building. Our first play-through, with two players, took about 2.5 hours, a little above the 120 minute time shown on the box. I also played a solo game that took an hour or so, although I am fairly certain I played a bit loose with some of the rules (mostly because I’d already had two drinks, which is not great for modeling paths in your head, it turns out). The solo mode has you playing against the clock, trying to complete seven prestige buildings in seven rounds, with certain costs increasing on you as the game progresses; either I missed a rule somewhere or there needs to be a better way to obtain income, both currency and influence tokens, to give you a fighting chance here. (I did “win,” technically, but again I think I skimmed some rules here.)

I see two fundamental problems with Founders of Gloomhaven, starting with the rules themselves. They’re not well written or organized, and terms are used to mean slightly different things – “own” in particular has multiple distinct definitions in the game, as does “import” when referring to resources. The BGG forums for the game are filled with rules questions like those, or asking about the multifarious rules on tile placement. The other is that it seems to be too hard to get roads to place on the board – if ever a game needed a card like Catan’s Road Building development card, this is it. You can forego money in the income phase to take and place roads, but that puts you at some disadvantage in the next round, and that is one of just two ways when you can place multiple road tiles at once, the other coming with certain adviser cards you must purchase. The game can’t work without a big network of roads connecting resource stalls and buildings around the board – you actually don’t have enough claim tokens to set up unique resource buildings in each section of the board – so all this shortage does is add some needless length to the game.

One last positive aspect worth mentioning is that there is some collaborative effort to the placement of buildings, especially prestige buildings, because multiple players can benefit from any such placement. That speeds the game up a little it, and also encourages players to work together on building the network around the board (which comes with two sides, one of which is apparently harder than the other). For a game of this depth and potential time requirement, a collaborative aspect is both welcome and necessary.

The game has a list price of $80 but I’ve seen it regularly under $50; amazon has it right now for $45. I imagine it’ll appeal to Gloomhaven players for its theme, but this is much more of a game in the vein of heavy strategy titles like Great Western Trail or Whistle Stop from last year, games that focused on tile placement but also required you to manage multiple other tracks (no pun intended) at the same time that you’re building out the board. It’s solid, and offers some novelty in the semi-collaborative aspect, but I don’t think I’ll pull Founders off the shelves before some other heavy strategy games that play more smoothly or are just more fun.

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→ February 17, 2014
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Takenoko.

Takenoko is our new favorite family game, easy enough for my 7-year-old to understand (and, after two plays, completely memorize) the rules, just complex enough to require some serious decision-making, with beautiful components and a kid-friendly theme. Aside from one small hiccup in the rules, it’s about as perfect as any adult/kid boardgame out there.

In Takenoko, the emperor of Japan has been given a panda as a gift, and the panda does what pandas do – he starts running around the emperor’s garden eating bamboo, frustrating the royal gardener. The board changes each game as players lay hex tiles in three different colors on the table, starting with the central pond tile, then irrigating each tile so they can add bamboo stacks to it – although the panda will move around the board and eat bamboo when the players need to collect some.

On a turn, a player takes two actions and may not perform the same type of action twice. Action choices include adding a hex tile (draw three, choose one to place, return the other two to the bottom of the stack); add an irrigation canal; move the gardener to an irrigated tile, adding bamboo to that one and any adjacent, irrigated tiles of the same color; move the panda, eating one bamboo section from the tile where he lands; or take another objective card to try to score more points. After round one, each player rolls a “weather” die before his/her turn, allowing him/her to take a third action, perform the same action twice, or do specific tasks like moving the panda for free.

Players all work to build up the royal gardens, earning points by completing “objectives” on three types of cards. The first kind involves creating patterns of hex tiles on the board, with the player scoring points once the tiles are placed in the right pattern and are all irrigated. The second requires the player to collect bamboo sections, scoring once he’s obtained the whole set shown on the card. The third and most difficult kind, the gardener cards, require constructing specific bamboo stacks – four sections of a single color on a specific tile type, or sets of three or four stacks of exactly three sections, all of the same color. Task rewards range from 2 points up to 7, and the game ends when a player reaches a specific threshold based on the number of players in the game (equal to 11 minus the number of players, if you don’t mind a little arithmetic). The player to reach that threshold first gets the Emperor card, worth an additional 2 points.

The tile types I mentioned above involve improvement tokens, some of which are printed on the hex tiles already, with 9 more miniature tiles available for players to add to tiles as they see fit. One type prohibits the panda from eating bamboo sections on that tile (which means the stack can never shrink); another makes the tile particularly fertile, so it adds two bamboo sections instead of one each time the gardener drops by; and the third, the watershed token, adds irrigation to a tile regardless of its access to the central network of canals. These can make reaching certain objectives easier, but the gardener cards that call for building a bamboo stack of four sections specify what improvements are required to earn points – some cards call for a specific token, and the others can only be scored if the stack is on a hex tile with no improvement tokens at all.

The lone hiccup in the game comes from the existence of multiple objective cards with the same pattern or requirement within each deck. In the gardener and tile-pattern decks, that means a player could draw the same card twice and, in theory, score twice for fulfilling its requirements just once. The rulebook points out this possibility and suggests a house rule to cover it; we’ve played with the simplest solution, that no player can score the same objective card from these decks twice. The panda objective cards don’t present this problem, because to score such a card you have to return the bamboo sections you’ve collected to the central repository; if you draw the same panda objective card again, you have to start collecting from scratch anyway.

Takenoko has a high interactive element with a low screw-your-opponent factor; you can sometimes infer what your opponent is trying to do, but you probably won’t be certain, and making a move to stop him/her just sets you back from achieving your own objectives. You can, however, benefit from what someone else does, or find an opponent has inadvertently blocked you, so choosing what steps to take when is a big part of Takenoko strategy. The time required to run irrigation lines out to hex tiles placed two or three spaces away from the central pond is also a big factor in deciding when or whether to go for a hex-pattern objective, and because the panda and gardener can only move in straight lines, you may also find yourself trying to position them in your current turn so you’ll have a fighting chance to get them ready to strike in your next one.

Games run very quickly, maybe a half hour for the three of us to complete a game, in large part because the rules are straightforward enough for my daughter to make reasonably fast decisions and to decide before her turn arrives what she wants to do. (This also involved her making vague threats to my wife and myself about what might happen if we screwed up what she was trying to accomplish on her next turn.) The components are well-made and attractive, with a sensible box for storage and the right number of small bags to keep the bamboo stacks and other pieces separated.

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