The Cherry blossom trees are everywhere in your garden, and their season is almost here. Everything in your Zen garden needs to be perfect so the trees can grow to their full beauty So its time for you to start to arrange your water, stones, vegetation and other trees in such a way that you obtain the best balance. Today we will look at a game that allows you to do just that in Ohanami!
Ohanami is published by Pandasaurus Games and designed by Steffen Benndorf. Art by Christian Opperer, it is designed for 2-4 players and plays in 20 mins.
Overview
You and your fellow gardeners re trying to design the best Zen garden while drafting and placing cards in ascending and descending order in three different gardens. Pick the right cards for you but make sure not to pass the best ones on to your opponents!
Gameplay
There is a deck of 120 cards containing water, vegetation, stones and Sakura trees of different numbers. Each player is dealt 10 cards and then the deck is set aside. Players will take two cards from their hand and then pass the deck to the player to their left in the first and third round, to the right in the second round.
Once everyone has two cards, beginning with the last player to pass their hand players will place their two cards into one of three gardens in front of them. The individual cards can start a column garden at any point or go on top or bottom of an existing one. So the numbers on the cards must be higher than the highest or lower than the lowest already in the column. If you cannot place a card, you can discard it. Play this 5 times in a round until all players hands are empty.
At the end of the round players will score their gardens based on the round. In the first round only the blue water cards score. The second round both the blue water and green vegetation will score and in the third and final round all of the cards will score. The Cherry blossom cards, the Sakura trees score differently. They will progressively score more points in the final round based on the number of them that has been acquired into your garden.
The game ends after three rounds and players score up all of their points from the three rounds to determine the scores. The player with the highest score is declared the winner!
Impressions
Our family plays a lot of games that are quick and easy to setup on the table after dinner, in-between bigger games or just for a nice end to the night. Ohanami works so well in all of these categories-it is super easy to learn and teach to anyone, it plays in less than 20 mins and scales well at all the player counts. This is a game that genuinely surprised me at how much strategy and thought needs to go into how you build your beautiful Zen gardens.
We found it to be an easy game to learn and the first few plays definitely start more in the solitaire type of style as you try and focus mainly on your gardens and what decisions you have to make. Do you go high or low at the ends, stagger them to leave lots of open spaces or focus more on a particular color or type as your main group? Be careful not to let one player run away with the pink cards-these score a lot the more you get and can easily swing the game for one player. As you play it more however this is where the strategy starts to open up more as you need to pick and play the best cards for you while also not helping your opponent by leaving them ideal cards. Drafting is such a fun mechanic and this one does it well.
Overall this is another solid entry in the small-box game family from Pandasaurus that have really focused on a great gaming experience in an affordable and portable package. It is easily teachable and one I have really enjoyed playing. It is quick, easy to get to the table and accessible enough to find its way into a lot of different gaming experiences for me. From a game night with gaming and non-gamer friends to a light game at the end of family dinner, Ohanami has a place in my library and I hope you find a way to add it to your garden of games as well!
Thank you for the review, I really appreciate it! Much love ❤️