Designed by: Richard Garfield
In Bunny Kingdom, players are competing colonies of rabbits – yes – trying to spread their fiefs over the land.
The board is broken up into a grid of squares, with each square a territory. As soon as a player controls adjacent territories, they become a fief, and can score at the end of the round. A fief scores by counting up the towers in it, and multiplying that by the number of different resources (wood, sheep, carrots, etc).
So, your objective is of course to make sure that your fiefs contain plenty of both. And although the board is big and the bunnies are plentiful, the heart of Bunny Kingdom is all about the card play: it’s a card-drafting game, where you choose two cards from your starting hand, and pass the rest on to your neighbour. After these cards are played, you choose two more cards from the hand you were passed, and so on, until eventually there’s only two left for you to play!
The cards have a variety of effects. Any card with a grid number means you simply place a bunny of your colour on the matching territory on the board: it’s now yours and will remain so for the rest of the game. Some territories come with resources, but some don’t, and you can improve them by building cities, farms, or trading posts there. Cities will add towers to your fiefs, whereas farms and trading posts bring your more resources. There are a few other special cards too, that allow you to link different fiefs together, or expand your fief with a Camp and hope the rightful owner doesn’t arrive to turf you out.
But about a quarter of the deck is made up of scroll cards, which only score after the fourth and final round. These reward in a variety of ways (for a particular resource; a number of fiefs; and certain type of territory under your control, et cetera) and when chosen, each player keeps them hidden until the end of the game. Come the final count up, they can provide huge haul of points and catapult a lagging bunny into the lead…
No direct conflict at all, although there are circumstances where a judiciously-placed camp might hamper another player's expanding fief...
It's one of those games where the speed can vary widely depending on the players; if someone is considering every single wrinkle then there may be pauses.
And there are a few wrinkles to consider, especially in those early stages when you have a large hand of cards and every one seems to have an allure...
The cards always give you decisions to make, whether it's your first play or your twentieth!
2-4
Players
10+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
Mmmm, brightly coloured plastic rabbits, fighting for power... although despite the box art, there's no actual fighting here; these rabbits are so passive-aggressive. I wasn't sure this would be my cup of tea but I enjoyed my few plays - the decisions you're faced with when selecting cards can be agonising - especially if you want to consider how your opponents might use what you're passing them. And that's the possible rub here; I've played with fairly speedy opponents and we had fun with Bunny Kingdom, but with players prone to deliberation it can slow to the point where the fun may begin to feel intermittent. I'd also caveat that the end-game scoring takes rather a long time, and that's a slightly underwhelming finale to an experience that ends up feeling not so much like a battle for dominance, but a chin-scratching series of decisions about which cards serve you best. So... it's fine. Not amazing, at least not for us - but I can see certain groups (a trio perhaps) enjoying repeat plays due to the various ways the cards combine