Review - Ohanami

 

Players: 2 - 4
Playing Time: 20 Minutes
Age: 8+

According to a quick Google search, Ohanami (Hanami) (花見, "flower viewing") is the Japanese traditional custom of enjoying the transient beauty of flowers.

In the game Ohanami, player try to grow the best garden! 

Cherry blossom season is about the blanket zen gardens with their resplendent wonder. Water, vegetation, stones, and sakura trees must be placed in perfect harmony in order to become a Master Gardener. 

Designed by the Spiel des Jahres nominated designer of The Game, Ohanami is a relaxing and competitive drafting game where players grow their gardens season after season.

The Goal:

Score the most points by building the best garden.

The Setup:

Shuffle the deck of cards numbered 1 to 120.  Deal 10 cards to each player.  Remaining cards will be used in future rounds.

The Play:

Each player looks at the 10 cards in their hand and chooses 2 cards.  Players pass the remaining cards to the next player face down.   Players must then play both cards either in their garden or by discarding.  

Players can have up to 3 columns of cards that represent their garden. To play on a garden, the card must have a higher value than the highest card in a column or be lower than the lowest number in a column.  If you cannot or choose not to play either of the cards, you may discard them face down.

After all players have played their cards, repeat choosing, passing and playing until card cards have been played (each player will have played/discarded 10 cards).  The round ends and you calculate your score for the round.

Round 1:  Only blue cards (3 points each) are scored.  

Round 2:  Only blue cards (3 points each) and green cards (4 points each) are scored.  

Round 3: All cards are scored...blue (3 points each), green (4 points each), gray (7 points each) and pink (sliding number of points based on how many pink cards you have in your garden.

You can read the complete rules here.

Review:

Fans of The Game will love Ohanami.  There are a lot of the same gameplay elements between the games, specifically making columns of cards in ascending/descending order.    We played it with both 2 and 4 players and it worked well with both, but we preferred 4 players because all 120 cards would be used.  With 2 players, only 60 of the cards are seen.

Overall, we give Ohanami an 8 out of 10.  It is a nice, fast game.  Would be a great filler game on game night  You can pick up a copy of Ohanami in our eBay Store or in our new web store at www.howlingfun.games. 
 
You can follow us on Twitter @HowlingFunGames and on Facebook.