Panda Spin Review – Bamboozlingly good

I’ve got more card games than any one person has any right to own, but I love them! I don’t just keep any old nonsense, though. Games have to be fun. So why on Earth do I need yet another one? I mean, the artwork is gorgeous, and there’s shiny gold foil on the box, but is it worth owning Panda Spin, too?

In a word – yes. Panda Spin is awesome, and I find myself enjoying it more each time I play.

Let’s dig into exactly why.

Shedding some light on gameplay

I find it interesting that the rulebook for Panda Spin refers to each round as a Trick, because it makes it sound like a trick-taking game. It is not most other trick-taking games for a few reasons. Firstly, most trick-taking games see each player getting one chance to play into tricks. Panda Spin lets you keep going until you pass. Secondly, instead of taking a trick, when you win one, you get to discard all of the cards you played, instead of claiming them. The number of tricks you win is meaningless.

Panda Spin is a shedding game, and if you go into it with that in mind, you’ll have a much better time learning it. It plays more like games such as Scout (read my review here) and 1 A.M. Jailbreak (you can read a review of 1 A.M. Jailbreak right here). You have to play the same type of sequence as the person who started the round

Those sequences can be single cards, pairs, threes, sequential runs, or interestingly, runs of multiple cards. So you could play 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6 for instance. Beating the previously played cards just means having cards with higher values. The winner of each trick (for want of a much better word) gets to ditch their cards to the discard pile, which is a good thing in a game where you want to get rid of all your cards.

But losing a hand? Losing is where it gets interesting.

I’m blue da-ba-dee

Each card in each of the five suits has two different ends. They start with the white side up and have standard playing card values from 3 all the way up to J, Q, K, A. Interestingly, there are also cards with the Chinese ‘two’ symbol (二) on. These are more powerful than Aces, but cannot be played in runs. When you lose a trick, and you played all white-side cards, they all come back into your hand, but rotated 180 degrees so they’re blue side up.

Blue cards cause all sorts of nonsense. They might have two 9s instead of a single 9. They might have a water drop, which is wild and can represent any value. They might have a fire symbol, which lets you discard a card, or a panda, which lets you use whichever panda power you currently have in play. So you might lose a trick and end up taking six cards back to your hand, but you now have two cards with four 10s between them.

Powerful, powerful nonsense.

In your first few games, you’ll be glad just to ditch cards as often as you can. It doesn’t take long to start seeing room for strategy. You’ll purposely pass on tricks you could win, just because the improved blue end of the cards you’ll take back set you up very nicely indeed.

Each suit in the game also has an element card, which goes into the shuffled deck. They each have a specific condition to be able to play them, something like ‘Win any trick with a panda played into it’, which comes with a penalty of having to draw two additional cards, but leading in Panda Spin can be so important.

Leading means playing whatever combination you want to, and playing something meaty to win a trick feels so good.

Final thoughts

“Onions have layers. Pandas have layers. You get it? We both have layers”. So said Shrek in an alternate universe where he was a Panda and not an Orge. Probably. And he’s right, especially in the case of Panda Spin. It has lots of layers. Every time I play it it feels slightly better, slightly more interesting than it did the time before. And I can’t put my finger on why.

Trying to learn it from the rulebook feels more difficult than it actually is, and as soon as you’re up and running it’s a very easy game to run, and an easy game to teach, too. Really it’s a box with a bunch of cards and some cardboard points tokens. Even the different suits take a back seat compared to the direct, mechanical gameplay. The only indication that a card belongs to a suit is a small logo at the top of the card. It has no meaning during the game. All that matters are values.

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Panda Spin is my favourite card game right now, and I end up teaching it to as many different people as I can. I even bought card sleeves for it, and I’m soneone who only ever sleeves games that I know are going to get worn out. It looks gogeous, it plays like a dream, and it costs less than £20! Get yourself a copy.

Pros & Cons