There’s a great game named Takenoko. In Takenoko, the emperor has received a panda. He leaves his panda in his gardener’s care. Your goals are plotting the land in specific patterns, growing certain amounts of bamboo, and having the panda eat certain amounts of different types of bamboo.
These actions please different people. The emperor wants the land to be in specific patterns, the gardener needs to grow certain amounts of bamboo, and the cute and cuddly panda (who certainly didn’t eat the bamboo) needs to eat certain amounts of the gardener’s precious bamboo.
On your turn, you start by rolling the weather die. Each side has a illustration representing types of weather. Each type of weather has a certain benefit you can use that turn only. Once you’ve rolled the weather die, you place special tokens on each of the actions you plan to do. You do this so that you cannot change your mind after your first action. You get 2 actions a turn, unless you roll a specific condition on the weather die.
There are 5 actions you can choose from on your turn. One option is that you can place new land tiles. To do this, you chose 3 face-down land tiles and chose which one you want to play. The other 2 get discarded.
You could also choose to move the gardener. He and the panda can move any direction in a straight line. If the plot of land the gardener moves to is irrigated, it receives one bamboo of the corresponding color. Every irrigated plot of land of the same color next to the one the gardener has just tended also receives a piece of bamboo.
The panda moves similarly. However, when he moves, he only eats from the plot of land he is physically on. The player takes 1 piece of bamboo from the bamboo plant and places it in their personal “stomach”. When the player has a specific amount of certain colors of bamboo in the “stomach”, they achieve 1 of their panda goals.
If you like, you could spend an action to irrigate a plot of land. You do this by taking an irrigation stick and placing it along the edge of any plot of land. The last option is to draw a goal card. You can chose from the 3 different types.
The game ends when someone achieves a certain amount of goals, depending on the amount of players. Once someone hits that certain amount of goals, it initializes the final round. At the end of the final round, the person who initiated it gets the ‘Emperor’ card, which is worth 2 points.
Now everyone counts the victory points in the lower left corner of their goal cards. The person with the most points wins!
I would play this with most of my friends and family due to it’s simplicity and peacefulness (except for the gardener… he’s upset with the panda).
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