Currently at number 237 on BoardgameGeek, I've played Takenoko a few times and really enjoyed it, and recently got to play with the Chibi expansion! Below I will begin with an introduction to the game, and then discuss the expansion.
What is Takenoko?
In Takenoko, an emperor has received a panda as a gift. You will control the gardener, growing bamboo and trying to keep up with the panda, who you'll also control, eating the bamboo that the gardener just planted. You'll also lay more garden to play on,where more bamboo will grow.
You'll complete various tasks to earn points, and the number of points will depend on the difficulty of the specific task. Once a player has completed enough tasks, they are awarded some bonus points, and everyone else plays one more round, then tally up the points to determine the winner!
How to Play
You can see a full pdf of the rules here, but to give you an idea, there are 4 colours of bamboo, and the colour that you grow depends on the colour of the tile the gardener is working on. You'll also need water touching that tile to grow anything on it. Move the gardener to grow bamboo. For example, move the gardener to a yellow tile, and provided that it has water, grow a yellow bamboo on that tile, plus one on any yellow tilles touching that one, provided that they also have water.
Move the Panda to that tile, and the panda will eat one yellow bamboo. Put this bamboo in your Panda's belly on your scorecard.
On each turn, you roll a dice to get bonuses, and you take two actions.
There are 3 categories of tasks:
Panda cards: fill up the panda with a specific number of a specific colour of bamboo. I find this to generally be the easiest of the tasks.
Tile cards: Grow the garden in specific patterns. This is generally about medium difficultly.
Gardener cards: Grow enough of certain coloured bamboo. When you reveal the card you must still have all of that bamboo standing. This may be the most difficult depending on how the game is going.
Strategies
You can rush through easy tasks to end the game before anyone notices or gets a chance to plan things, or you can build up on completed tasks and reveal them all at once, or focus on sabotaging others if they seem to be building toward something (panda is good for this!), or work on doing lots of high point tasks. In my most recent game, I felt that the expansion helped me to work on the difficult gardener cards that other players were ignoring. My husband rushed all of his tasks out in one turn, and I beat him by one point!
Chibi Expansion
In the expansion a lady panda is added to the garden, and she can create baby pandas. Do this to get some bonus tools to assist with your goals, and for some bonus points at the end of the game. There are also new tasks, and new tiles.
I found the tiles to be the most interesting part of the expansion. If you put the gardener onto a sacred hill tile bamboo grows on all irrigated tiles of that colour! This made gardener tasks quite easy in my opinion.
I ended up ignoring the lady panda and her babies, and still won the game, so I didn't feel that they had a huge impact. However, the expansion did come with alternate rules that we have yet to explore.
What is Takenoko?
In Takenoko, an emperor has received a panda as a gift. You will control the gardener, growing bamboo and trying to keep up with the panda, who you'll also control, eating the bamboo that the gardener just planted. You'll also lay more garden to play on,where more bamboo will grow.
You'll complete various tasks to earn points, and the number of points will depend on the difficulty of the specific task. Once a player has completed enough tasks, they are awarded some bonus points, and everyone else plays one more round, then tally up the points to determine the winner!
How to Play
You can see a full pdf of the rules here, but to give you an idea, there are 4 colours of bamboo, and the colour that you grow depends on the colour of the tile the gardener is working on. You'll also need water touching that tile to grow anything on it. Move the gardener to grow bamboo. For example, move the gardener to a yellow tile, and provided that it has water, grow a yellow bamboo on that tile, plus one on any yellow tilles touching that one, provided that they also have water.
Move the Panda to that tile, and the panda will eat one yellow bamboo. Put this bamboo in your Panda's belly on your scorecard.
On each turn, you roll a dice to get bonuses, and you take two actions.
There are 3 categories of tasks:Panda cards: fill up the panda with a specific number of a specific colour of bamboo. I find this to generally be the easiest of the tasks.
Tile cards: Grow the garden in specific patterns. This is generally about medium difficultly.
Gardener cards: Grow enough of certain coloured bamboo. When you reveal the card you must still have all of that bamboo standing. This may be the most difficult depending on how the game is going.
Strategies
You can rush through easy tasks to end the game before anyone notices or gets a chance to plan things, or you can build up on completed tasks and reveal them all at once, or focus on sabotaging others if they seem to be building toward something (panda is good for this!), or work on doing lots of high point tasks. In my most recent game, I felt that the expansion helped me to work on the difficult gardener cards that other players were ignoring. My husband rushed all of his tasks out in one turn, and I beat him by one point!
Chibi ExpansionIn the expansion a lady panda is added to the garden, and she can create baby pandas. Do this to get some bonus tools to assist with your goals, and for some bonus points at the end of the game. There are also new tasks, and new tiles.
I found the tiles to be the most interesting part of the expansion. If you put the gardener onto a sacred hill tile bamboo grows on all irrigated tiles of that colour! This made gardener tasks quite easy in my opinion.
I ended up ignoring the lady panda and her babies, and still won the game, so I didn't feel that they had a huge impact. However, the expansion did come with alternate rules that we have yet to explore.
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