I don’t know if it’s because I grew up in the era of the original Nintendo, but games that resemble Tetris in any way really call to me. Our whole family loves puzzles and Tetris, and Miyabi is a really fun and beautiful game with similar shape-manipulation elements. What it also has is a beautiful Japanese garden design theme – ooh la la!!
Each player takes a set of colored wooden lanterns (I’m blue) and a Garden Map and then, depending on the number of players, garden tiles are chosen from the box to be used in each round.
Basically, you pull 2 per player of the 2 smaller sized pieces (light green and purple) and 1 each per player of the 2 larger pieces (red, green).
Players take turns fitting the garden tiles into their garden, but a few important rules must be followed:
- Garden feature tiles can only be placed in a single column per round. Once a garden feature has been placed in a column, place a lantern in the red rectangle at the top to block it out for the rest of the round
- Garden feature tiles can only be placed in their respective rows.
- Garden feature tiles can be stacked, but each tier must be solid. Tiles cannot bridge lower tier tiles, they must cover them completely.
I think that’s it…
The basic game is very simple to learn, but not easy to win!
A winning strategy has to include a plan to earn some bonus points. The first player to reach the 5th tier in a single garden feature gets the bonus point token for that feature.
There are also bonus points awarded at the end of the game for the 2 players with the most and second most garden features in a row.
You have to get bonus points to win, so plan your garden carefully!
For gameschooling math purposes, I love this game’s scoring mechanism. Players score each tile that is laid, and the point total is a math equation!
“number of objects on the tile” x “layer it’s placed on”
There’s math going on all through the game, it’s wonderful! Plus the actual placing of the tiles uses math brain skills like spacial planning/reasoning and analytical thinking. Which tile to take and where to put it for the maximum number of points?!? It’s an excellent brain exercise for the whole family!
We LOVE Miyabi and know you will too. Thanks to HABA for sharing with us!
