Review

Japanese Garden Art

Miyabi

Maple tree, Fish, Pagoda or Stone?

Japanese gardens are real works of art and are planned even the smallest details. Following those ideals, we are asked to create our own garden from a selection of six garden elements, one in each row, for a 6x6 grid - Maple, Pagoda, Fish, Azalea bush, Boxwood and Stone. A total of 96 garden tiles, made up from one to three squares, are available for placement in our gardens.

Sounds easy, but is not always easy, because in adherence to the idea of planned Japanese Gardens we must, in 6, 5 or 4 building phases in case of 2, 3 or 4 players, keep to very detailed placement rules.

For each of these building phases a certain number and kind of garden tiles is prepared according to player numbers, and displayed openly.

Then players take turns to be active player. You take any garden tile of your choice from the display and add it to your board, following the placement rules; objects go into their row and only into unmarked columns. If you could place a tile, you mark the used column with a lantern and score the number of objects on the new tile, multiplied with the level in which the tile was placed. Tiles in higher levels must be placed so that their entity covers tiles on the lover level, there cannot be a gap underneath. If you are first to place an object of a certain type into the fifth level, you score the corresponding bonus tile. After the last building phase, you score object majorities: the player with most objects in a row scores the higher of two scores for this object, the player with second-most objects scores the lower object score.

In variants, you can also score your biggest connected group of objects or the biggest meadow - now there is no meeple in it - or you add the 16 Zen parts to the garden tile, or you move a frog over your garden and score for it reaching higher levels or you score, at the end, rows and columns with exactly seven objects in them.

So far so simple, good and a little bit challenging; because following the placement rules can be a bit difficult, as you only can select from a limited range of tiles and thus the perfect one is not always available. Sometimes you need to decide between maybe taking a smaller tile for less points, but closing a gap with it so that you have more options for placement on the next level, or selecting a bigger one for more points that would create a gap difficult to fill - a very interesting and important element in the game.

Dagmar de Cassan

Players: 2-4

Age: 8+

Time: 45+

Designer: Michael Kiesling

Artist: René Amthor

Price: ca. 26 Euro

Publisher: Haba 2020

Web: www.haba.de

Genre: Tile placement, point scoring

Users: For families

Version: multi

Rules: de en

In-game text: no

Comments:

Compares to:

Sanssouci, Takenoko and other tile placement game with a garden topic

Other editions:

Currently none

My rating: 6

Dagmar de Cassan:

A beautiful game - topic, mechanisms and graphic design fit together marvelously, the level of challenge is exactly suited to a family game.

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 0

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0