I picked up Bonsai for five bucks from a clearance rack at Barnes & Nobel. What I ultimately found was something that had a little bit more style over substance, but was firmly aimed at the casual audience. Which is an audience that I have found I fit more and more with.
Like you probably figured, it’s a game about cultivating your own bonsai tree. It combines an action point system/resource management, that you cultivate with a tableau of cards, with tile laying.
The mechanics of the game are very familiar. While the game terms are meditate and cultivate, it’s really draw cards and place tiles.
For the meditation action, you draw cards from a central board that let you increase your tile storage capacity and the number of tiles you were allowed to place, along with cards that just give you points. You also get a limited number of tiles while you are at it.
Cultivation is tile laying, building up a bonsai tree out of hexagonal tiles. The tile placement restrictions are very intuitive and will create a very traditional looking bonsai tree out of tiles. You can also earn bonus point tiles if you hit certain goals with your tree.
At the end of the game, you get points for certain tiles, specific cards and any bonuses you got on the way.
Bonsai is not quite a true multiplayer solitaire because you are all drawing from the same pool of cards. However, even the indirect interaction is pretty limited.
However, that’s not really the point of the game. While there are points, and there are winners and losers, you aren’t fighting clever tricks to outplay your opponents. You are figuring out how to make your own best bonsai tree.
While Bonsai isn’t the prettiest game I’ve ever seen, the artwork really leans into the theme. I would even go so far as to say that it is understated in the right way. It lends itself to the soothing process of creating the slow sculpture of a bonsai tree.
A family favorite of ours is A Gentle Rain. While there is a goal and a way of determining how close you came to achieving that goal, it is really the decompressing process of creating a tableau of flowers that makes us play it. Bonsai fits into a similar category.
Bonsai isn’t a game for everyone or for every occasion. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if the audience for it is even bigger than I think it is.
