Review of Takenoko: Chibis

Blurb from the publisher: 'Well done, gardner! You have splendidly performed your duties by taking care of the imperial panda. As a reward, the Chinese emperor hands you over a second animal's care and not just any one! You will need to try twice as hard to take care of the couple... and also their babies!

- New plots with new effects: discover the gardener's cabin, the celestial lake, or Kamis' garden.'

What you get: Your EUR 18 or equivalent will buy you Takenoko: Chibis, the first and only, up to now, expansion for Takenoko, the two to four player boardgame that made quite the splash in 2011 when it came out and climbed straight to the BGG's top 300, amassing numerous award nominations and international accolades.

In addition to the small format 8-page rulebook that can also be found on the company's website free of charge, the game contains the following: one Miss Panda figurine, 9 Panda Babies tokens (3 green, 3 yellow, 3 green), 18 Objective cards (6 Plots, 6 Bamboo, 6 Pandas), 17 additional Bamboo Sections, and 6 Plots with the Miss Panda symbol.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have played Takenoko (not Takenoko: Chibis) competitively in the past with placements on the top-3 of the tournaments I participated in. This is not your average playtest.

Gameplay: The objective cards and the plots are mixed with the basic game's elements. At the beginning of the game Miss Panda is not in play. She is brought in when a Plot with her symbol is first added to the plantation. From then on, she moves in the same way as the male Panda: in a straight line and at least for one Plot, or following a storm to any Plot of the plantation. The player performing the movement has to choose whether the male Panda or Miss Panda is the one to move; they never move together.

When Miss Panda reaches a plot, she does not eat bamboo like her male partner. She might however give birth to a little Panda, provided that she ends up on the same plot as her partner, and the player who moved her can return a bamboo section from his stack to the reserve, in order to claim on the of the babies. Births happen only after Miss Panda finds the Panda, not when the male lands on the same Plot as her. Panda babies provide bonuses, namely a free irrigation, a free improvement and an objective change (returning an objective to the deck and randomly picking another). Each bonus appears once per colour of baby. In addition to the bonus, each Panda Baby provides 2 Victory Points at the end of the game.

When it comes to new objectives, Takenoko Chibis provides new types like having more of a particular colour in the whole plantation, having a Miss Panda signed Plot in the middle of the setup, having bamboos of different heights at the exact same time, having bamboos above a certain height anywhere in the plantation, etc.

Four of the new Plots are patently different to the old ones. The Kamis Garden hosts bamboos of all three colours. Depending on the gardener's interactions with it, one or all three bamboos might be growing at certain points. The Panda eats only one of the sprouts, rain grows only one of the sprouts, yet the plot counts for three colours when it comes to Plot Objectives. The Sacred Hills make all the Plots of the same colour grow, irrespective of where they are on the map. The Celestial Pond has the same functions as the central Pond in the basic game, while the Gardener's Cabin allows a player to draw the first card from each Objective deck, examine them all, and keep only one. No bamboo can grow in the last two types of plots.

The expansion also includes two variants. In Gourmet, the Panda never eats the first bamboo sprout; it only goes for sections two and higher. In Diversity, each set of different Objectives category (Plots/Gardener/Panda) earns a player 3 additional VPs.

The strong points: Takenoko: Chibis adds quite the options and the new tactics in an otherwise well-crafted light game. The game does not become exceedingly more complicated, and everything fits in place from the beginning. Bonus points for the game not becoming longer either.

Miss Panda does not consume bamboo, yet her placement in relation to the male Panda is important. One sloppy movement here or there, and you might give free babies (i.e. enhancements) to one of your opponents. The new Objectives are cool and add to the basic game, especially if you have played it that much that you can guess the Objective cards your opponents hold based on their behavior on the board.

Everything in the gameplay adds to bamboo growing faster and to bigger heights: the special plots where all three bamboo types grow or which force the growth of bamboo all across the board, the fact that there are now two pandas to move but only one of them eats, or that many of the Objective cards demand well-grown bamboo, meaning that players will be reluctant to force the male Panda to keep on eating. This makes the board appear better utilized, and adds to the options a player has during his turn.

I like the Diversity variant; it should have already existed in the basic game, and not just presented here as a band-aid. When players engage in Takenoko at a high level, the Diversity points can be systematically those that will determine the winner, seeing how they balance tactics and Objective selection better. Admittedly, this was one of the basic game's weak points.

The Miss Panda token is gorgeous, and so is the very colourful and kid-friendly art, that however was kind of expected. Speaking from experience, adults are more likely to melt over those designs than actual kids. They help a lot if you are trying to turn your little monster into a boardgamer.

The weak points: I feel that the Panda babies shouldn't have been one-offs. They work well as free bonus providers, I do feel however that keeping them on the board and imbuing them with a couple of additional mechanics would have added more value. It would also have forced Matagot to produce little baby Panda miniatures, increasing the cuteness levels to an eye-watering degree. On the other hand, such an approach would have made the game a bit harder for its main target group.

If you would like to play with more than four players on the table, you can't. The game remains a 2-4 player affair. Seeing how this expansions doesn't take any corrective measures towards the game's lack of interaction and meaningful participation during other players' turns, I don't see how any future expansion can increase the number of players without making the game more tedious.

If one didn't like Takenoko in the first place, I am not convinced that this expansion is going to change his mind. It creates a couple of more tactical layers, yet the main character of the game fundamentally remains the same. Its shortcomings continue to be there, some tactics continue to be better than others, and to a certain extent, especially at the beginning, the game feels scripted to those who know how to optimally approach it.

Conclusion: If one likes Takenoko, he will most likely enjoy what Takenoko: Chibis brings to the table. Without being a must-have expansion, it increases the replayability and the desirability of the basic game. Also, Miss Panda. What would Mr Panda do without her?

For more info on Takenoko: Chibis visit Matagot at http://www.matagot.com.

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