Win the favour of the emperor by what feels like ruining his favourite garden by collecting items from it, sounds a bit daft to me and to be honest it is a simple basic game that never quite leaves that realm.
The basic information for a basic game
Players: 2 only
Age: 7+
Time: 10 minutes
This game is designed to be learnt and played quickly.
What is in the box?
Inside this rather pretty illustrated box you will get;
16 garden tiles
16 Geisha tiles (8 per player) 1 Rulebook
That is all you need! I must admit I love the basic yet simple art style for this game, it does add to the overall feel for the game, sadly they do to improve the playability.
How to set up the game?
Take the 16 garden tiles and give them a shuffle, make sure you are not paying attention to the tiles.
Then place them in a 4 by 4 grid (image above as an example) the tiles need to be placed at random. I always start with the top left and lay the first row then move on to the nest row and so on.
Each player takes their 8 Geisha tiles and you are ready to start playing the game!
How do I win?
Winning the game is rather straight forward and you have 3 methods;
1 = Have 4 Geishas in a 2 by 2 square pattern
2 = Have 4 Geishas in a row (Horizontal or vertically)
3 = The other player is unable to play a Geisha tile
That is how you end the game and win!
How do you play?
The game is incredibly easy to learn and play, first you must pick a player to start the game which makes sense.
On their turn they must take one of the outside edge tiles and then place one of their Geishas in that spot.
The other player must now pick a tile that matches 1 of the 2 criteria for the garden tile they can take.
1 = The same type of plant
2 = The same type of item/weather
This sounds confusing but if you look at the two images above you can see that the first player picked the garden tile with a lily and a banner. This means the second player must take a tile with either a lily on or a banner on. This card can be any where. Once they take a tile they place their Geisha in the spot and the turn now moves back to the other player.
The game will continue in this pattern until one of the players wins! Told you it is a simple and easy game. To help understand the tile types see the image below.
You can see that the cards have been grouped to help you understand the types, you have lily, I call the next one cactus, then cherry tree and leaves (can you see the mistake on that row?).
Then across you have sunny, banner, bird and rain these are the other types.
So for example if I picked the Bird/cactus tile the next player could take bird/leaf tile, I can then take leaf/sun tile and then the other player could take sun/lily tile. Hopefully this shows you how the tile selection process works.
Final Thoughts
I like the style of the game more then I actually like the game which is never a good sign.
I do like the fact that it is quick to play and easy to learn and it does make a nice change to have a game dedicated to 2 players only.
The rules were easy to learn and teach, it played well there were no issues there, was it fun? Not really, Did we play it a lot? No, even with the game only taking les than 10 minutes a match we were bored after 2 games.
There is a fine line between simple basic game and simple basic fun game and this game just does not hit that mark.
4/10
