Flying bunnies!
More adorable bunny-meeples (buneeples?) in Bunny Kingdom: In the Sky, but does the expansion take flight or fall flat?
The TL;DR
Great components, same wonderful artwork
More of the same and some interesting twists
Some new parts were clunky
Not essential, but an interesting addition for those who love the game
Bunniesin the box (purple ones)
In keeping with the base game, everything in the expansion is well-made, in the same vibrant art style and continues the trend for rabbit focused punnery.
In the box you’ll find; a cloud board, new building tokens, additional cities and Carrotodels (more on those shortly), more cards, cardboard coins, more bunnies in the original colours and the fifth player purple bunnies.
New cards, Cloud Board and Wondrous Resources
The cloud board is the most obvious addition to the game. I’m really impressed with how this is set up with overlapping rows. As a result, a single space connects to up to 6 (rather than 4) spaces providing lots of combinations and ways to score points.
I’m also a big fan of how the annotation for the clouds cards works, the number of clouds on the card signify the row and the number how many spaces across. This gives you co-ordinates that are clearly different when you see them, but are also very clear – great job!
Telling which were the new cards wasn't difficult
As with most card-based games if like us you’ve played the base game a lot you’re going to be able to see the difference on the card edges when you add the new ones. Unlike other games, it’s unlikely to make a huge difference to gameplay even if you can tell.
The new Wonderous resource type is an interesting addition. During set up you add these to specific spaces on the cloud board meaning that a) they are always in the same spaces and b) you can’t add to the space they’re on. This is a shame, as with limited available space on the cloud, we frequently found players ending up with a lone Wondrous resource that couldn’t connect to anything.
Chimneys and Rainbows
The Chimneys are interesting and allow you to shower a basic resource from a cloud space in the same fief as the Chimney down on every fief on the main-board. This gives you the option to focus on claiming cities in small fiefs on the main board and using the Chimney/s to add the resources on mass.
Unfortunately, the Rainbows are a little underwhelming. While in theory they sound great; a sky tower you can move, the reality is that because they are fixed to a space that has no resources on it you will need to collect one of four connected spaces before it will add anything to a fief you connect it to.
Districts, Coins and Trade
Previously we had two terms for groups of spaces; territories for a single square and fief for a single territory or group of connected territories. Now we add Districts that are formed whenever a group of more than one territories are formed. When a district is formed players receive a coin. At the end of the game you multiply coins by the number of wondrous and luxury goods you produce.
This was my least favourite part of the expansion.
In a 6page rulebook an entire page is given over to the rules for earning coins when forming districts, we unintentionally broke the rules on a few occasions and several times each of us forgot to claim our coins. This added a level of additional book-keeping every turn that wasn’t fun and coin claiming should have been added to the harvest phase.
These resources already score
In addition to this luxury and wondrous resources already earn players victory points during harvests and don’t seem to be undervalued. They also already have parchments that give players a double reward for having them (one of which was added in this expansion).
Giving them a third scoring mechanic seemed unnecessary and made them significantly more valuable for no reason I could understand (even accounting for my comments above about lone resources).
Carrotadels and the 5th Player
With a silly name and great models, the Carrotadels are an excellent addition to the game and my second favourite part of the expansion after the new board.
Purple bunnies seize the Carrotadels
They set your strength for harvesting to five unless you have greater than five strength from other cities, in which case the Carrotadel is ignored. The result is a powerful way to beef up the strength of any fief early, or a way to make a small but resource-rich fief a scoring powerhouse.
With just three available they are probably getting drafted very aggressively!
Adding a 5th player to Bunny Kingdom doesn’t seem like something I’m going to want to do very often given the potential for AP (Analysis Paralysis) and the complexities of scoring but it did add purple bunnies ( wife’s favourite colour ), so that’s an upside!
Final thoughts
While it certainly adds a lot of new things, for me, it’s not an essential expansion. The base game doesn’t have huge issues that need to be fixed or janky mechanics than need to be smoothed, and the expansion doesn’t take the game in a markedly different direction. The things it does add seem very in keeping with what is already in the game, not really shifting the experience.
For those who already enjoy Bunny Kingdom, it’s going to be worth owning as you get more of the game you already love, but it is just that; more of the same great game.
Note that I was given a free copy of this expansion (I already owned the base game) for the purposes of providing a review.
