Multiplying in more ways than one in Bunny Kingdom

The Bunny King has sent you forth to conquer a new world and strengthen the kingdom.

You’re charged with making your fiefs prosper by claiming land, harvesting resources, establishing cities, and accumulating Gold Carrots.

The difficulty is that other Bunny Lords have been tasked with the same mission. Will you prevail in contributing the most to the expanded kingdom?

Bunny Kingdom may look like a bit chaotic with all those colored bunnies everywhere. But upon closer inspection, you’ll see the game is actually pretty straightforward.

Let’s take a look!

 

How to play Bunny Kingdom

As with many games that promise you a kingdom, the objective in Bunny Kingdom is to earn the most victory points from your maneuverings.

The game plays over the course of 4 rounds. During each round, players draft cards that allow them to establish Fiefs, construct cities, farm resources, and stash Golden Carrots (points) and potential Golden Carrots for later.

To begin, each player takes 36 bunny figures in their chosen color. The deck of 182 Exploration cards is shuffled and placed in a face down draw pile. In addition, each City location on the board is covered by a City figure with 1 tower.

At the start of every round, each player draws 10 or 12 cards (4-player or 3-player game) for their hand. They each choose 2 cards to play and place them face down in front of them. The rest of the cards are passed to their neighboring player (to the left in odd rounds and right in even rounds).

Before picking up the cards passed, players play the 2 cards they kept. This can be done simultaneously by all players.

There are 4 types of cards:

• Territory cards – represent a Territory (space) on the board marked by the coordinates on the card. The board is a 10 x 10 grid and there are 100 Territory cards in the game (1 for every space). When playing a Territory card, the player places one of their bunnies on the indicated territory on the game board.
• Building cards – allow players to place buildings (Cities of different sizes or tokens) on one territory they control (have a bunny). When playing a Building card, the player takes the indicated item and places it on the card in front of them (to build later). The City cards have a number at the top that indicates the size of city they can build (number of towers).
• Parchment cards – they give Golden Carrots (points) for certain conditions and are kept secret and only scored at the end of the game. When playing a Parchment card, the player simply keeps it face down in their growing stack of Parchment cards to score later.
• Provision cards – they let a player draw and play 2 more cards.

Then it’s time to Build.

Any item players have on their Building cards can now be played to the board. In doing so, players can only place that City or token on territories they control and must respect any requirements on the card.

For example, some cards indicate that a building may only be played on a specific territory type (field, forest, sea, mountain).

There can never be more than one building on a territory. And once placed, the building may not be moved.

After players have played their 2 cards, they pick up the cards passed to them and again choose 2 cards to play and pass the rest.

After all cards have been played, the round ends and players score their Fiefs.

A Fief is a group of connected territories that are controlled by a player. The score of each Fief is its Strength multiplied by its Wealth.

The Strength of a Fief is determined by the total number of towers in that connected Fief. The Wealth of a Fief is determined by the number of different resources within that Fief.

For example, a Fief with 3 total towers and 2 different resources will score 6 Golden Carrots. While a Fief with 4 towers and 5 different resources will score 20 Golden Carrots.

Players move their scoring bunny that many spaces on the score track and a new round begins by each player drawing a new hand of cards.

At the end of the 4th round, after normal Fief scoring, players reveal their Parchment cards and score additional Golden Carrot rewards from the conditions met on those cards.

The player with the most Golden Carrots (points) is the winner!

 

Can the whole family enjoy Bunny Kingdom?

Bunny Kingdom is certainly a board game families can enjoy playing together. However, it will take a first play before most players will get the hang of it.

This is also a game where we agree with the age recommendation on the game box of ages 12+. That’s because the game is full of choices and tradeoffs.

Right from the outset players are faced with choosing which cards to keep and play and which cards to pass. But with the board wide open, it can be tough to decide where to begin.

Most likely, the first choices will have players placing some of their bunnies on different Territories around the board in a seemingly haphazard way. Depending on the cards drawn, they may be spread out all over the place.

Little by little, players will get cards that allow them to claim adjacent Territories and start connecting groups of their bunnies into Fiefs.

But that also comes at the expense of choosing cards that let them put Cities or more resource tokens on their Territories. Because to score well, they not only need to have bunnies grouped together, but they must be on spaces with unique resources and City towers. The more towers, the better. So, they’ll want to choose to keep Building cards instead of Territory cards.

But they shouldn’t forget to pick some Parchment cards as well because those can be worth big points at the end of the game.

Oh, the choices!

It’s a good thing we love these types of choices!

We also love that all this happens simultaneously. That’s one of the best parts of the game.

Rather than needing to wait while other players to take a turn making their choices, everyone is looking at their hand of cards and making choices at the same time. Then after choosing and passing the remaining cards, everyone can take the actions from their chosen cards at the same time as well.

That’s not to say though that this is a solitaire game. Because the choices other players make will definitely impact you.

They’ll claim Territories that you’d love to have – blocking your ability to connect into larger Fiefs. And they’ll keep bonus cards that you’d also wish to have. But since you’ll quickly learn you can’t have it all, you’ll just have to make the most of which cards you do choose to keep.

The biggest challenge of the game comes at the end of every round – Scoring!

Actually, scoring after the first round is pretty easy because players won’t have a lot of scoring Fiefs to worry about.

But after rounds 3 and 4, there will be a lot of double-checking going on.

All players can score their Fiefs simultaneously as well, but we know many players will want to check each other to make sure they’re scoring correctly. (After all, you are competing for the most Golden Carrots.)

The good news here is that if you don’t want to do your own multiplication, the game comes with player aids that have a multiplication table to make it easy to calculate.

(If I would have started by mentioning the game comes with a multiplication table, would you have read this far?)

While that may scare you off, it only makes sense that a game about bunnies has multiplication in it, right?

Which means this game has a couple tie-ins to the bunny theme. First is that looking at the game board at the end of the game, you’ll see bunnies having multiplied all over the board. And second, you have to actually multiply numbers to get your score. Brilliant!

And of course, we love the artwork and style. It’s a very colorful game and very well produced. Another top notch game from iello.

 

How does Bunny Kingdom score on our “Let’s Play Again” game meter?

Bunny Kingdom is a mixed bag in our family. For some, because all of the 182 cards are unique, there seem to be too many options. But for others, we enjoy making the most of some of that randomness by how we get cards to work together in our favor.

Either way, every game plays out differently because of the endless combination of cards that come our way. Even in a 4-player game, over 4 rounds, you’ll go through only 160 cards (a bit more when the Provision cards come up). Which means a different mix of cards won’t be seen each game.

In my book, that means the game begs to be played again. But it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

Hopefully we’ve given you enough information and thoughts to get a clear feeling for the game to see how it may or may not fit with your family or game group.

 

Bunny Kingdom game insert

If you do choose to venture into this Bunny Kingdom, we also recommend you consider getting the Insert Here foam core insert for the game.

As you can see, the insert that comes with the game has a few compartments where the bunnies, cards, and tokens can be stored. It’s easy to keep the different components in baggies so even when they slide around, they stay organized.

But the Insert Here game insert makes the organization even better!

The different colored bunnies all have a home to call their own. This makes it super simple to dive right into game play as well as for clean up at the end of the game.

Just pull out the trays for the number of players and each player can set their bunny tray next to them. There’s no need to pour them onto the table. Just pull from the tray when it’s time to place a bunny in a new Territory. And it’s easy to toss them back at the end of the game.

Likewise, each of the City sizes have their own section in a removable City tray. There’s no need to search for the City with the matching number of towers because they’re already sorted.

And the 182 Exploration cards fit easily into sections of their own as well. There’s even enough room if you decide to put the cards in sleeves.

Overall, the Insert Here game insert for Bunny Kingdom is a great way to keep everything organized and easy to use during game play.

We’d like to thank Miniature Market for a review copy of Bunny Kingdom and Insert Here for a review copy of the Bunny Kingdom game insert.