The Professor and I saw this on Tabletop. We were watching the extended cut, so it was a much longer video (regular here). The Professor doesn’t really like it when things are drawn out. For example, he prefers to watch movies in fast forward, and bought the Blu-Ray Player we have because you still get sound at the first level of fast forward. So he skipped around a lot on the Tabletop video, and by the end, I thought he was uninterested in the game. However, this was the first game he wanted to check out at a gaming event we went to.
We played two rounds of the game. The first round was mostly us just getting used to the game. At first we would forget to place our action tokens on our board. In any game involving strategy, players tend to think ahead. So we knew what we wanted to do and would do it without using the action tokens. I didn’t realize until looking at the rules while writing this that we actually made it a little bit more challenging. Instead of choosing an action and carrying it out before choosing the second, we chose both at the beginnings of our turns. So Space Cat would choose draw Objective and move Panda. After drawing her Objective, she couldn’t change her mind about moving the Panda. I think I actually prefer to play this way because it really makes you think about your actions.
Round One:
- Space Cat – 21
- The Professor – 28
- Chubby Unicorn – 42
Round Two:
- Space Cat – 29
- The Professor – 36
- Chubby Unicorn – 40
Game play is pretty simple, making it a good family game. The ability to draw new Objective cards before finishing the ones you have is really helpful. Once you get far enough in the game you can figure out which one is your best bet. For example, if there’s a lot of bamboo on the board, you should draw a Gardener Objective. If you’ve rolled lightening a lot (which I did), and you have bamboo on your board, draw a Panda Objective. Turns are fairly short, so it moves at a good pace. It’s made a nice addition to our collection.