"Takenoko" - the game of being fat and looking cute

Did you know that a grown adult panda
can and will punch the ever living shit out of you? Having pandas around is a common cure for constipation. This is a little known fact that I just made up.

Being a panda is something that no one has ever fantasized about. That insatiable hunger for bamboo, the whole not ever getting sex thing, and the constant desire to punch people makes it one of the least desirable animals to be. It's no wonder that pandas as a species are so tired of being alive. But, I guess for those rare occasions when you feel like living the panda life without the incessant need to punch, this is one-third of a game for you.

As everyone knows, Takenoko is the Japanese word for "Do not Take a Ko." The game puts you in old-ass Japan, where you are trying to collect one of three different sets which are depicted on cards. Panda cards are completed when your panda-stomach is full of different types of bamboo. Farmer cards encourage you to grow stalks of bamboo to some specified height, while the third set requires you to build the world to fit a certain shape. The sets may interact with each others in unique ways, since you may both complete a panda set and farmer set at the same time HOW WEIRD AND WACKY.

What is a ghost panda's favorite food? BamboooooJUST FUCKING KIDDING it's tacos

This game is all about worker placement / set collection, a combination of concepts that seems to be pretty simple to introduce multiple elements of strategic decision making. The balance of randomness from dice rolls or card draws versus what other players do is heavily shifted towards the latter. A real game involves making decisions based off what has happened before your turn. Some would argue that games where your opponents decisions bear no impact on your thought process are not really games at all. Often times in Takenoko, your opponents will nom down all the bamboo that you need to complete one of your sets, and you'll want to make like a panda and punch them until poop goes flying everywhere.

What was so good about THIS particular collection of cardboard pieces?
THE ART. HOLY BUTT SPARKLES! ITS SO GOOD. Everything from the cuteness of the box art to the cuteness of the panda token radiates cuteness beams. The art style is cohesive and fairly minimalist, but seeing this box really sucks you in and before you even realize what the hell is going on, *SHAPOWZ* you're whipping out your massive credit card and flopping it onto the table for everyone to see. Although I really enjoyed the game mechanics overall, particularly the concept of multiple semi-antagonistic gameplay elements, to me the most appealing part of the game was the art.

"Carcassonne" - whatevs man

"CLASSIC EURO GAME BLAH BLAH" 
WHATEVER lets just say how disappointed I was to find out this game was not about turning your opponents meeples into carcasses. Instead, there was an awful lot of road building and cloistering. If cloistering isn't a euphemism for a dirty word, it really should be.

In many ways, the basic "world building" premise was similar to what we experienced with Betrayal at House on the Hill, except the odds of being chased by cannibals is a lot lower in Carcassonne. Also, you don't really interact with the world you build, the building itself is the game. Like SimCity without disasters, policemen, computers, cheat codes, basically nothing like SimCity. You grab a tile, throw it on the table as long as the roads / buildings connect with each other in a logical manner, and by the end of the game you collectively become the shittiest city planner in all of ancient france. Whenever you drop a tile, you have the option to throw one of your wooden dudes on the tile, either on the road, the city thing, or in the grass. Dudes thrown onto the grass are now farmers, which is offensively denoted by laying them down.

Have you heard of the new expansion, where all the meeples are replaced with dog-meeples? It's called "Barkassonne." 

You are limited in the number of meeples you can throw down, so it benefits you to wrap up whatever structure you're working on, so you can regrab your meeple and score those yummy victory points. Otherwise, your meeple gets stuck in this purgatory, whereby they can no longer earn any mo' points. This was a strategic concept I didn't fully learn until, i dunno, never.

Have you heard of the new expansion, where you can only play at night? It's called "Darkassonne."

Of all the games we have played in our journey into modern board games, this one by far had the greatest number of fluffy sheep and somehwat-above-average-sized trees. Because of this, we found the game really peaceful and relaxing - clearly we didn't understand the finer points of how to fuck your fellow players. Looking back on it, there were many moments where understanding the configurations of the tiles remaining would give one of us a huge advantage. Building useless paths and dead ends could block off another person from finishing a structure, therefore turning their already-placed meeple into a uselesseeple, unable to return to the hand to score more points. I imagine there is a high skill cap to this game, making it a highly competitive game. Once you know all of the tiles and how many of them are in play at any time, you can use this nollij to build offensively, preventing others from finishing their castles. Now ain't that some evil-ass shit.

Have you heard of the new expansion, where all the meeples are named "Mark"? It's called "Why the Fuck would Meeples have Namesassonne"

Hilariously, we all tried to play Carcassonne online later against each other, but turns out Carcassonne Castle is not the same game. Like, at all. First of all, you're blocked in by some dumb walls. The fun part about Carcassonne was the freedom to expand our countryside into some awful sprawl of a city full of incomplete buildings ala EVERY SUBURB IN TEXAS EVER. You can only play 1v1, which is equal parts lame and wack. And no fluffy sheep, so fuck that version. 

Stuff that was cool:

You kept track of score by moving a tracker around the board, but at the end, a whole poop-ton of extra points get distributed among the players based on resolving unfinished buildings and the farmers. There is a way to see who is currently ahead, but at the very end, there's this tense moment when you add up the score from the meeples who are still hanging around on your awful shaped countryside, and then tack these points onto your score. 

SURPRISE BITCH suddenly - you're not the winner anymore. It's got a very blue shell-Mario Kart feel to it. When you're losing, you do desperate things to try to score. Having a "hidden" score counter (which technically isn't hidden, you just gotta be REALLY good at counting.) makes gameplay interesting to me, since those desperate strategies might not ever come out.

To me this game is like your best friend from summer camp. It's cool to see it randomly, because at one point it was the dope hotness. Buuuut you really don't need to see it more than once. LOL SORRY FANBROS COME AT ME BROS.

Can someone send me a casual picture of Tony Stakassonne walking through a city parkassonne?

"Betrayal at House on the Hill" - A horror themed "board" game?

HOW CAN THIS BE CALLED A BOARD GAME
when there's not even a board?

what. The concept of building a board with tiles was absolutely mind blowing to me. All my life, "The Board" was the defining characteristic of board games - an immutable world in which your character lives, navigates, eats, and poops. As a long time video gamer, Monopoly and other linear board games felt like the original NES Mario Brothers, a limited one dimensional world where you can go up, down, and forward.

You could imagine how confused I was when I started playing Betrayal. It was Super Mario 64, where we the players could move in any direction we wanted to. We were taken off the rails of the roller coaster, free to fly around. It was a completely open world for these random-ass explorers to chill in a giant, obviously haunted mansion (Why would a small Japanese child be hanging out with old priests and a professor? .... probably best not to answer that.)

Oh, also, it was Mario 64 where the land was different EVERY TIME you booted up the game. Fuckin neat-o.


The concept of a randomly-generated board game was so unique to me. One of my favorite genres of video games is the infamous roguelike (with Rogue Legacy and Crypt of the Necrodancer being two of my absolute favorites.) These games, with their brutal, uncompromising gameplay, do not encourage grinding for levels - they encourage getting better. The kicker: When you die (and you will die), the next playthrough will be a new procedurally generated dungeon. Sure, a handful of elements remain constant everytime you play. But the two most important elements of a game, the win condition (exit of the level) and loss condition (layout of the baddies) are both random.

And lets talk about the second half of the game. Some rooms of the mansion contain an Omen. The player revealing the omen room performs a haunt roll, and for each omen room on the table, the difficulty of the "Haunt roll" increases. When a character fails a haunt roll, someone is declared the betrayer via an arbitrary decision described in the rule book. Then, a random horror themed scenario takes place: A giant two headed worm trying to take over the house, a horde of cannibals running around being assholes, your friends eating all your girl scout cookies when you thought you had a whole nother box but you don't, etc.

Except for these, these suck, you can have them all.

Apparently, this is a board game concept called Tile Laying. The randomness introduced by playing tiles from a stack adds tremendous replay value, but also the possibility for shitty, unplayable situations. There's tons of room for random events to happen - you could, theoretically, fail the haunt roll on the first omen room. Basically, you get lured into a giant haunted house to get mauled by a werewolf immediately after entering the front fuckin door. On the other hand, the random tile placement could lead to unplayable situations. A hideous powerful spider queen trapped in the godforsaken basement with no way back up? GODDAMN TERRIFYING in real life, but boring in real game.

What things would we steal from this game??

Games need to be a combination of strategic skill and random luck. Dice rolls or card drawing add the replayability to keep a game fresh long after you tear off that obnoxious plastic wrap, but excessive random elements negate skill. The challenge we have to address is to develop a way to toe the line between a luck based game and a skill based game. This is where inordinate amounts of playtesting is going to pay off. However, a well designed amount of random elements will give losing players a chance to catch up, and the possibility for winning players to lose. Most importantly, randomness emulates real life.