As caretakers for Kodama, the tree spirits, you must keep the forest a healthy and lush home for your little friends. It wasn't easy to decide how to grow each tree so that it would be in harmony with nature and be inviting to a varied flora and fauna. Everything is done very professionally with this company and always lets you know every step of the process. It feels very therapeutic when you attach each branch card to your tree’s trunk or extend an existing branch. The rules for placing are simple yet restrictive: the new card is placed partially over the top of an existing card, so that the branches pictured join up.

In a world where every tree is inhabited by its own gentle and benign spirit, it is your important task to ensure that every sapling grows strong and big, and offers a home for as many small creatures and plants as possible, thereby creating harmony and balance in the forest. A Kodama is a Japanese tree spirit, and s/he’s looking for you to grow a lovely new home for her or his (?Turning off the personalised advertising setting won’t stop you from seeing Etsy ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive. The Deluxe version adds 12 additional Decree cards for added variety, but the standard version will offer enough replayability. The game box is on the smaller side making Kodama: The Tree Spirits portable and easy to take on the go. We also thought that some Kodama cards were better than others, but it balanced out in the end because the scores were rather close.

Trunk cards will depict one of the six special icons that will appear throughout the game – Mushrooms, Flowers, Earthworms, Fireflies, Stars, and Clouds. In a world where every tree is inhabited by its own gentle and benign spirit, it is your important task to ensure that every sapling grows strong and big, and offers a home for as many. From the designer of the hit game Kigi, Kodama: The Tree Spirits branches out into a fun new way to play!Starting with the player with the 1st player marker, the active player will choose one of the branch cards from the display and places the card onto their personal tree. Like focussing on specific features or for getting as many cards as possible touching your trunk, say. You can immediately see that this game is friendly and enjoyable, and as you start to play it, your expectations are met. These icons are incredibly important, as these will determine how you will score during each turn and round. Every time you play a branch card, you try and make it neatly fit your tree, which is very satisfying and makes you feel rather creative.

But this wouldn’t be a game without some way of identifying who has the best tree and the Kodama have kindly provided thorough guidance on that issue. The range of angles that your played cards create and the different amounts they overlap produces this organic feeling of the game and that I haven’t seen in any games since – or before.

There are also 12 player tokens used for keeping score, a scoring track board, 1 Season token to keep track of the seasons and the rounds, and a 1st Player marker. Most will concentrate on improving their own Kodama, rather than choosing cards in a desperate act to block others from scoring.

Being one of the initial backers, I have had the chance to play this a fair amount to date, inviting dozens of people to experience it and what it has to offer. At the time of writing, neither the designers, nor the publisher, nor anyone linked to the game supported me financially or by payment in kind. Kodama: The Tree Spirits is a small box card game, for 2-5 players, published by Action Phase Games. There is also very little player interaction, even though it is competitive and everyone draws branch cards from a central pool of cards.In Kodama Forest, everyone works with their neighbors to cover as much of their shared player boards as possible.