Takenoko is a world-building game where you cultivate a bamboo garden for a Japanese Emperor. You play by placing Garden tiles, adding Irrigation pieces and making Bamboo stacks grow. It's a competitive gardening game where you battle other gardeners as well as the elements.

You play as a gardener, competing for space around the emperor's well, growing and harvesting bamboo. Each go you choose between placing tiles to extend the garden, growing bamboo or feeding the panda to meet your individual objectives like matching patterns, growing combinations of colours or feeding the panda. The harder an objective is, the more points it is worth.

It's tricky because players can steal each other's crops and spoil your plans. This means that you never quite have it all your own way, as their objectives lead them to consume the bamboo that you have just carefully grown, or muddling a long-planned pattern of tiles.

What starts as a peaceful garden-building game, quickly becomes a struggle for territory, bamboo and control of the panda. You need to plan ahead, whilst being ready to adapt when those plans are foiled by other players.