The game I played this week is Trash Pandas, a card game that also uses a die. The target audience is mainly children, but the game is suitable for anyone 8 years and older. Trash Pandas was made by Gamewright, a company founded by four parents who wanted to make kids’ games. The game is meant to be played by 2-4 players.
Trash Pandas is similar to our game in a few ways. The first way is that both games use a die, which each player rolls on their turn to determine which action cards they acquire and will use for their turn. In addition, we are also currently using Trash Panda’s dice roll mechanic, which makes it so that if a player rolls the same number (and therefore action card) twice in a single turn, they “bust” and don’t get any, and have to draw a card to end their turn. This introduces luck, suspense, and decision making, as players have to weigh the pros and cons of rolling for more action cards while others are hoping for their downfall.
That brings me to the action cards. The action cards in both our game and Trash Pandas dictate what players do on any given turn. In addition, both games’ action cards include sabotage (although in completely different ways), extra card drawing/deck viewing, and progressing towards the goals of the games. There are also many differences between the action cards of the two games, with one of the main ones being that the action cards from Trash Pandas are centered around stashing cards for points and sabotaging other players’ stashes, while the action cards from our game are centered around gathering as many ingredients as possible and serving customers’ pizzas how they like them.
The final similarity between our games is that both games currently end with the depletion of the deck of cards.
Now, I will move on to discussing the core differences between the two games. Trash Pandas is a game where players aims to “stash” cards by placing them face down. Various cards have 3 tiers of points, and at the end of the game, each player reveals their stash, and the player with the most of a type of card gets the number of points corresponding to 1st place for that card, the player with the second most instances of that card gets the 2nd place points for that card, and the player with the third most instances gets the 3rd place points. This tier of points is present on almost every card, and so players have to strategically aim to stash cards that they believe others don’t have/aren’t stashing, in addition to storing cards that give a lot of points. The player that has the most points at the end of the game wins.
Our game’s theme and win condition are completely different. In our game, players aim to serve various pizza shop customers (such as “meat lovers” or “just hungry” customers) by using action cards from dice rolls to gather the ingredients customers are requesting or to place ingredients on and build their pizza to eventually serve. Each customer has a number of points associated with them, and the player that serves a customer gets the points associated. Whoever has the most points when the card deck is depleted wins.
Because of the different themes and win conditions, the action cards in both games are different too. In Trash Pandas, the actions players can take on any given turn center around stealing other players’ cards from their hands or stashed piles, stashing cards and drawing cards. While our game also includes drawing cards, we’ve also introduced a mechanic where there is a pile of face up ingredients that everyone can see in the center, and one of the action cards allows a player to immediately place one of the ingredients from the center on their pizza. In addition, the rest of the action cards center around placing ingredients and serving customers.
Something that As a game designer, analyzing “Trash Pandas” provides insight into its strengths and areas for improvement across various elements of game design:
From a design perspective, I believe Trash Pandas does a great job at employing simple yet engaging mechanics, including the set collection and push-your-luck mechanics. This is how Trash Pandas creates both the competitive aesthetic along with abnegation. Trash Pandas incorporation of cards that are simple to understand and use, but can totally change the course of other players’ turns and the game, contribute to these seemingly contradictory aesthetics. Because of the low skill ceiling present, players can use the game as a pastime while also being competitive to varying degrees, employing many different strategies to try and win.
Trash Pandas has a mechanic where if you stash one of the cards (“BLAMMO”) that allows you to re-roll your last roll, it counts as 2 points. This was implemented because it allows players the option to give up such a valuable card in return for 2 points. I believe this mechanic should be implemented in some of the other useful cards in the game, such as “Kitten” which allows you to basically reverse other players’ steal actions and take a card from them instead, or “Manners”, which lets you ignore your last roll and choose to stop. I think the inclusion of this mechanic in more of the very useful, game changing cards would introduce a deeper level of strategy and more ways for players who aren’t fortunate in getting stashable cards to win, albeit at a big cost. This would balance the game a bit more, removing some of the luck component associated with the game.
I also believe Trash Pandas can incorporate more strategic depth, with action cards and tokens that allow players more power to affect their hands, and actions they take with stashable cards. One mechanic/action that could be introduced is a card that has the user stash a card for someone else in return for choosing a random card from their hand/stash to add to the user’s pile.
I do believe there are some useful mechanics and ideas we can learn and possibly incorporate from Trash Pandas into our game. One of the most fun and proud moments I had when I was playing Trash Pandas was when someone had just rolled 3, and was going for one more roll. They got a 4th unique action token, and didn’t bust yet. They then took the opportunity to stop pushing their luck and start resolving their action tokens. However, I had a “Yum Yum” card in my hand, which forces a player to keep on rolling. I laughed, and proudly played the card, forcing them to roll one more time. Sure enough, they rolled a token they had already acquired, as the chances were in my favor (4/6). They had to bust, putting all their action tokens back, and drawing a card to end their turn.
There are other mechanics such as the “Yum Yum” card in Trash Pandas, which allow players to sabotage others at any point in time. This keeps players on their toes, and introduces a very fun social dynamic where players can have fun sabotaging actively sabotaging each other and laughing about it. Our game can definitely use an element that allows players more power when it is other players’ turns, because we noticed during our team’s playtest that when it was one player’s turn, other players were not paying much attention and would zone out of the game at some points.
I do like that we’ve incorporated the push-your-luck dice roll mechanic, because while I was playing Trash Pandas, there were moments when players would bust, which while sad, set up the atmosphere for everyone to erupt when a player successfully acquired 5 action tokens! (the highest I had seen during my time playing) The push-your-luck mechanic adds an element of suspense, triumph, and pure excitement to every turn, which keeps the game interesting.
Overall, Trash Pandas is a unique game that offers simple, competitive fun. It is similar to other games like it including Deep Sea Adventure, with the push-your-luck mechanic, Sushi Go (which one of my group members played for their critical play) with the set building mechanic, and Unstable Unicorns with the incorporation of thematic elements. However, Trash Pandas is also different from other games in its genre as it has less direct player interaction compared to a game like Exploding Kittens and doesn’t have the strategic depth you find in a game such as Sushi Go.
