Pilfering Pandas Review
Make sets for panda prison break!
Mandatory cooperation to avoid the Zookeeper, and carefully manipulate communal sets. 1-4 players, 30 minutes. Prototype featured.
Video published May 6th, 2021
Manage your hand very carefully
Choose a special pair of pandas
Cooperatively lay down sets or rows
This is a sponsored review.
Overview & How to Play
Hurry hurry! We’re all trying to escape this zoo together, but the zookeeper is after us!
Pilfering Pandas has our team of pandas trying to escape a zoo by reaching a certain point. To move up said progress, we play sets from our hands. If the black Zookeeper token ever catches up to us, we get throw in our cages and lose the game.
For the sets, they’re played to a center area where our buddies, the Meerkats are (see Nenal & Aria). You want runs of numbers going up or down, or you can also play matching numbers. A set has to be at least 3 cards, and grants a team points equal to the little black panda icons on the cards.
Quick catch to this though: every time you play cards, the Zookeeper gets alerted and moves up once.
Turns just consist of drawing a card from the communal deck, or a communal hand on the board called a Hideout, then playing as many cards as you want, then discarding a card to that Hideout to end the turn. And everyone is on a timer, because after each turn, the Zookeeper moves up one space towards us pandas.
Pros
We really like the art style here- feels incredibly appropriate, with the bright tones where you’’ll never get categorizes confused for sets. There’s even names for the pandas, with personality types! Our prototype came with wooden markers that felt great.
Pilfering Pandas is all about the nuanced set collecting though, and all sets are interconnected on the board, so even when you do have a set ready to play, you can’t just jump the gun. Since sets always influence later sets, as you have to play off of the last card of the previous set, placing certain cards can actually be a death sentence to your team.
Combine this with the Meerkats not being entirely too friendly. These Meerkats have limits on how many cards you can put down, before they start making noise and further alerting the Zookeeper. So you really gotta time your set placement to make sure you eek out as much value before those Meerkats start screeching.
The ‘Hideout’ that anyone can draw from is a great introduction into the cooperative play here, where you can be loading up this Hideout for a couple turns, then BAM! One player grabs the entire Hideout, then has a giant turn using the 12 or so cards in hand. That can be like 2-3 big sets! Players will want to be deliberately handling this Hideout, and then sets on the board together. Since no one can see each other’s hands, there is no quarterbacking whatsoever too, which we always bless in cooperative games.
Pilfering Pandas runs extremely efficient for its 15-20 minute mark, with cooperation starting right off the bat, interesting ways to set collect come from the different Meerkats and panda abilities, and tension is rampant with the Zookeeper constant inching forward. The pressure is ON to escape, as players keep setting each other up for strong sets.
And super surprising thing- the competitive mode is good enough to be a standalone game. Here, you constant keep track of what your buddies are playing to not accidentally help them with every turn’s discard that is shared with the cooperative mode.
Cons
The prototype elements of the rulebook needed some ironing out though. The gameplay setup diagram is absolutely tiny, and the book needs more gameplay examples in general. Yeah, turns out that passing on your turn is a very acceptable play that should’ve been more encouraged.
As a quick point that is explained further in the video, the panda abilities are slightly unbalanced, and player aids could be better.
In Pilfering Pandas, it also SUPER easy to accidentally cheat and give away some type of hidden information to your friends by all the discards, and workarounds you can do with conversation like:
“Oh heyyy, that’s a 5, and that’s a green card, good colors huh? Just some food for thought.”
Final Thoughts
Chances are you’ve played set collection playing card games that are just as short as Pilfering Pandas. but then Pilfering Pandas has a bit of theme AND the HUGE turns where you can empty the Hideout. Your brain will just keep thinking on anyone’s turn, and then just keep talking in the cooperative mode! Actually, whether it be in cooperative or competitive, there’s a fast game to be had here, but it still packs a punch in terms of decisionmaking.
