OUR REVIEW

BAMBOO, WATER AND A PANDA

Takenoko

Game of the Year 2012 in France

The recipe for a good game is simple: You need a good designer, a good editor and one or two good ideas. To guarantee success, you also take good illustrators and component designers, and an enticing topic with rules that are easy but not simple. Then you pay attention to the duration of the game, so that it keeps being fun and pack all into a pretty box, full of beautiful components. For Takenoko, as you might guess by now, all this is true. For the first time on shop shelves in 2011, it was already sold out at Christmas time in most shops. And it only seems logical that the game has received its first award, Game of the Year 2012 in France.

The designer of the game, Antoine Bauza, has established himself as indispensable in the game community within the last five years. He can record one success after the other in very different areas. So, his “7 Wonders”, a world-wide award-winner, should not gloss over the fact how vastly different his other designs are, for instance "P'tites Witches“, an introduction for children into the genre of role-playing games, "Monster unterm Bett / La Chasse aux monstres / Monster Chase " as a game for a very young user group, or Hanabi, his innovation in the genre of cooperative games.

Takenoko takes us to Japan, a country that the designer especially loves and has visited several times already. He was looking at a souvenir picture of his visit to the Tokyo zoo on which he is seen standing next to the sculpture of two cute pandas when he had the idea for this game. And so it came about that a symbol for China, the panda bear, is now appearing in a game that takes place in Japan. To explain the presence of this plantigrade in the Empire of the Rising Sun the designer tells the story that the Emperor of China has presented the Emperor of Japan with a Panda and thus has begun a tradition that today is part of the daily diplomatic/commercial relations.

We sit in front of the plans of the Imperial Gardens in Tokyo and busy ourselves with expanding the gardens and enlarging the irrigated areas within the gardens. Due to this irrigation the bamboo plants grow especially beautiful and make our ambassador from China want to gobble it all up immediately. In order to win it will be really necessary to play all three colors of bamboo present in the gardens and to enlarge the gardens in a way that our plantigrade will always have enough bamboo sprouts available to satisfy his insatiable appetite. All this is governed by three kinds of objective cards, which players must complete in order to win the game.

Seductive components

When opening the box one is easily seduced by its contents. The board is made up in the course of the game by placement of the 28 land plots, represented by hexagonal cardboard tiles. On 27 of these plots bamboo can be grown, up to a maximum height of four sections which are stuck into each other. So, in theory, there should be 108 bamboo sections, but in reality the 90 sections included in the game are more than enough to play, because, on the one hand, the gardener cannot till and irrigate all of the plots and, on the other hand, Panda eats up a section of bamboo each time when it moves, this section is returned to stock later in the game.  Players can also use additional irrigation channels to irrigate the plots further and also improvement chips to improve the plots.

Gardener and Panda move along those plots, they are both nicely sculptured figurines, in representative size and prettily painted, they do immediately catch your eye. The balance of the components is made up by a wooden die for weather and 46 objective cards.

Each player receives his own individual board which depicts icons for the various possible actions; furthermore there are three storage areas on these boards: A space for irrigation channels, a space to deposit improvement chips and the Panda stomach. Two markers for each player are used to mark the five actions from which you can choose in your turn. The editor even paid attention to the detail to print another pattern on each player’s markers. This distinction is of no practical use whatsoever, but it is a small detail showing the painstaking and loving attention the editors have paid to this game. It is not difficult at all to find volunteers for a game when the components have been spread on the table.

Please the Emperor

In order to please the emperor his courtiers, represented by us, the four players in the game, do all that is in their power to simultaneously enlarge and irrigate the garden and to appease the insatiable appetite of the sacred animal. These tasks are represented by three kinds of objective cards. The first stack represents three or four land plots, arranged in geometrical shapes, which must be laid out in the garden in the same way in order to score the card: For instance, three pink plots in a row or four green plots arranged like a diamond. In order to score, you must find exactly this arrangement in the correct colors in the garden and make sure that each of these plots in irrigated to enable you to score the card!

The second stack of objective cards comprises cards featuring bamboo plants of a given size, showing one, two, three or a maximum of four bamboo sections. In order to complete these objective cards you must find a bamboo plant of this height (one, two, three or four sections) on the plot of the correct color in the garden, and also the correct number, if more than one plant is shown.

The third and last objective is to have the correct number of bamboo section in the correct colors on your individual board, stored in Panda’s stomach. You choose the correct pieces from all those Panda has eaten up so far for you, that is you must have the pieces on your own individual board and discard them back into stock to complete and score the card.

The three colors of bamboo are not represented equally in the colors of the garden plots: There are eleven plots in green, nine plots in yellow and seven plots in pink color. Due to the scarcity of pink plots the objective cards showing this colors, are more difficult to complete, but score more points towards winning the game, for the bamboo plants as well as for the sections eaten by Panda or for the plot arrangement cards.

On the other hand, the green objective cards are easier to complete but are less rewarding. Of course you must take into account that those facts and the resulting tactics are known to other players, too. But you can use the knowledge of color frequency and memorizing the number of plots already placed to your own advantage. When there are already 6 pink plots laid out your chance to pick up the seventh pink tile is rather small – this kind of attention enables you to recognize unrealistic objectives.

Players try to complete a number of objective cards to end the game, the number of cards you must complete in order to do so is given by the number of players. As soon as one player reaches or surpasses this number of completed cards the game ends when each one of the other players in the game has taken one complete turn. The first player to reach the required number of cards earns a small bonus of two points, the Favor of the Emperor. This bonus often is not enough to win the game if you were content to complete only the objective cards of lower value.  The value of objective cards varies between two and eight points. It is easy to quickly play and complete objective cards of low value and thereby trigger the end of the game, only to get the bonus of two points, but this could be a very risky strategy.

You can overtake another player even if you have completed two or three cards less that this player, as long as your cards are of higher value. But as the cards in hand are kept secret until they are completed it is difficult to know how far along the others are. You can complete one or more objective cards any time during your turn, as this is not counted as an action. So there is no need to complete and lay them out early. Of course you should lay out a card and thus completing it when you want to draw another objective card and have already five cards in hand. In theory you therefore can lay out up to 6 cards more than the player who has triggered the end of the game, provided have a chance to earn the number of points and do not play the strategy for experienced players.

The most profitable cards are the hardest to implement. To assist in this it is recommended to stock up on irrigation channels; do not overlook that possible action. Having some improvement chips in stock in order to adapt plots can be very helpful, too, but this depends on luck and chance. Some cards of high value demand a complete bamboo plant consisting of four sections and planted on a plot that shows a certain improvement chip. Is this plot already available or must we see to its preparation? If you choose to place a plot for your first action you can have a chance to do this. But otherwise you you will have to equip an empty plot of the respective color with such an improvement chip and thus create toe basis to complete the objective card! But take card! A mistake often made in our first games was to place the improvement chip on a plot where a bamboo plant is already growing. This is not allowed in the rules and the corresponding passage is printed in red, which does not change the fact that this mistake is made again and again.

If you cannot prepare the conditions to complete the card with the corresponding plot being available and do not have the necessary improvement chip you can only hope for inadvertent assistance by one of the other players. Our fellow players sometimes have some nice surprises for us!

Two actions for each player after the weather die

In order to score as many points as possible with objective cards a player can implement two actions per turn – they must be different ones – and he can choose from five possible actions:

1. Take a plot from the stack and add it to the
2. Take an irrigation channel and either place it in the gardens or put it into storage on your board

3. Move the gardener
4. Move Panda
5. Draw a card

These five possible actions are indicated with their own icon on your board. When you have chosen an action is is covered with one of your two action markers. Both actions, as already mentioned, must be different, but you can choose which one to execute first. For instance, you can choose to place a plot for your first action in the hope to acquire a yellow plot in order to grow yellow bamboo; then in your second action you could move Panda there to eat the yellow bamboo, which it would love to do. If the first action goes wrong because the plot is not yellow than you can change your target for the second action and do something different.

In the first round of the game there is no weather, but from the second round on each player in his turn first rolls the weather die to predict the weather. The result of the role allows the player a specific effect or action depending on the weather in addition to his regular two actions.

1. When the sun shines, you can choose and implement three different actions, the die is used as a marker for the third action.

2. If it rains, a bamboo sections grows on an irrigated plot of your choice.

3. When the wind blows your second action can be identical with the first one. This advantage is not very important at the start of the game, but can be very strong in the end game.

4. When lightning strikes Panda is frightened and flees to any other plot, as if he was flying, and upon arrival immediately eats one section of bamboo. 
5. Clouds yield an improvement chip, which you can either place directly onto a plot or place into storage on your board.

6. The face showing the question mark allows you to choose any of the other five weather situations to your liking; it announces weather of your choice!

This additional phase of weather conditions, which is entirely chance-driven, will probably be disliked by fans of strategic games. Some of the die results seem to be far more potent than others, but this also depends on the moment in the game, how far the game has advanced. Because Wind, which allows you to implement the same action twice, can be very very powerful in the end game; it can allow you to achieve a special result, something that seems impossible beforehand, thanks to a double movement of gardener or Panda, maybe even with a second irrigation channel.

Play in the rain

As you see, the parameters for the game are numerous, but, on top of all other things to do, there is no way to avoid or neglect irrigation. If you have a chance to acquire an improvement chip with Clouds, the choice of a water basin often is the best choice over all others. To acquire a stock of irrigation channels at the start of the game is also very important. Any time a plot is irrigated for the first time, a bamboo section grows on it, should it have the Gardener improvement, even two sections will grow. Growth also happens when a Water Basin improvement chip is on the plot. Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that w player places a water basin improvement on a plot despite this improvement being printed on the plot or despite the plot being adjacent to an irrigation channel. This mistake occurs rather often, so please do not forget this rule!

The irrigation of the plots is important for completing object cards with bamboo plants or bamboo sections as well as for those with geometrical arrangements of plots. You need to remember that those plot arrangement cards can only be completed when all plots depicted in the arrangement are irrigated. With some luck, your fellow players will provide the necessary irrigation, but to put your trust in your fellow players only can be dangerous.

A game that will be loved by all or nearly all …

The charming topic which is entirely free of aggression will be loved by families, which are the first and main target group for this game. But do not look down your nose at the tactical possibilities; most experienced players will want to give them a try. Takenoko therefore unites different target groups and at the same it perfectly demonstrates the attractive possibilities of modern board games.

In the end, the only ones who could complain about Takenoko might be the designers and publishers of those games that also were nominated for the Award Game of the Year 2012; the winner Takenoko was too strong for them!

François Haffner, Jeuxsoc

Players: 2-4

Age: 8+

Time: 45+

Designer: Antoine Bauza

Artist: Nicolas Fructus, Joël van Aerde & Yuio

Price: ca. 29 Euro

Publisher: Bombyx / Matagot 2011

Web: www.asmodee.de

Genre: Placement and collecting game

Users: For families

Version: multi

Rules: cz de en es fr jp nl

In-game text: no

Comments:

A game good for both families and experienced players

Top especially attractive for girls

Continuous decisions between fast and easy or difficult high-scoring task cards

Compares to:

Basically all games with execution task cards; first game with this specific combination of elements

Other editions:

Hobby Japan, REXhry Czech Republic, Asterion Press Italy

My rating: 6

François Haffner:

An interactive game without any element of aggression! The topic, charming and definitely non-violent, will please any family, for which purpose it was intended first of all. But it is also a challenge for experienced players. The components are of an especially beautiful and attractive design.

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 2

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0