The latest game I backed on Kickstarter was Kodama. If you've seen Princess Mononoke, the name might ring a bell. Kodamas were those cute little forest spirits with rotating heads that became extremely popular. In this game, your goal is to grow a tree so that these cute spirits have somewhere to play and stay over the winter. Thanks to the wonderfully cute creative direction and novel gameplay mechanics that are easy to grasp and still pose a nice fun challenge, Kodama quickly became my favourite game to bring to my friends for gaming afternoons.The central mechanism of growing a tree is brilliant. Each player has their trunk card and every round they add a branch card to expand the tree. A branch card may only be laid over one existing card in a fashion that the connection of the branch looks natural. Especially in the later parts of the game, this makes players position their branches carefully so that there is still room for future expansion and still look for a way to connect the cards so that they look natural.
