tabletoppingboardgames 
This is a game where you flip your cards, lose on purpose (sometimes), and occasionally steal bamboo from your friends with a panda. It’s called Panda Spin, and it’s not quite like anything else I’ve played.
At first glance, it looks like a light trick-taking game with a bit of a theme layered on. But after a few rounds, it reveals something a little more curious. It’s a game about timing, about adapting your hand mid-game, and about figuring out when to hold back and when to strike. It’s not flashy, but it has some genuinely clever ideas.
The cards are all tied to the five Chinese elements: fire, earth, wood, water, and metal. Each card belongs to one of these suits, and most of them show zodiac animals in lovely stylised artwork. But the key mechanic is that each animal card has two sides. The white side shows the physical form, and the blue side shows the spiritual form. You start with everything on the white side. If you lose a trick, those cards come back to your hand, flipped to the blue side, and they become stronger or gain special symbols.
It’s a small twist, but it changes how you think about your hand.
👥 2-5 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 25 minutes
📝 Designer: Carl Chudyk
🎨 Artwork: Wenjue Zhuang & CMYM
🏢 Publisher: Matagot (review copy provided)
How it works
At the start of the round, each player gets 12 cards, all on their white side. The goal is to get rid of all your cards before the others while collecting bamboo tokens, which are the points you need to win.
A player starts a trick with a legal combination of cards. That could be a single card, a set of matching values, a run of up to five consecutive values, or a formation. There are also bombs, which are sets of four or more cards with the same value, and those tend to beat most other things. The other players go around in turn, either beating the current play with a stronger version of the same type or passing.
Then there are element cards. These are separate from the animals and have specific conditions printed on them. If the trick meets that condition, you can play the element card and instantly win the trick. You also get to draw two new cards and everyone else has to pass. It’s quite a swingy move, but also not always easy to pull off.
If you win a trick, the cards you played get discarded. If you used a blue card (the spiritual side), it goes away permanently. If you lose the trick and you played cards on their white side, you take them back and flip them over to the blue side. These are generally stronger and can include special symbols.
Fire lets you discard a card from your hand. Bamboo gives you a point. Water acts as a wild number for combinations. Panda triggers one of two mood effects, depending on the mood tile for that round. You’re either in “hungry panda” mode, where you steal a point from the previous player, or “spin panda” mode, where you get to flip another card in your hand to its blue side.
The round keeps going until everyone but one player has emptied their hand. If you go out during a trick, you “show out” and get points equal to the number of cards still held by the player with the biggest hand, up to a maximum of seven. If multiple people go out at once, they all get the same amount. If everyone runs out of cards and no one has any left, no one gets points.
The game ends when someone reaches 15 points. If no one’s there yet, you just deal a new round and keep going.
Design and presentation
Visually, Panda Spin is nicely done. The cards are clear and colourful without being messy. Each suit is easy to recognise by colour, and the animal illustrations are detailed without getting in the way of the game. You can tell that the layout was designed with actual play in mind.
The two sides of the animal cards are very distinct, so flipping them feels meaningful both visually and mechanically. Symbols are printed clearly under the values, which makes spotting abilities pretty straightforward once you know what they mean.
Element cards look a bit different and include their play conditions in clear text at the bottom. Once you’ve played a round or two, it’s easy to keep track of what you’re holding and what you’re trying to set up.
Scoring is done with small wooden bamboo tokens, which are a nice touch. The panda mood tile is a circular disc that shows which effect is currently active. It’s chunky, easy to read, and brings a bit of charm without being too silly.
Everything looks and feels consistent. The iconography is clean, the symbols are easy to recognise, and the game doesn’t try to impress you with too many unnecessary extras. It’s a small game that knows what it is.
Our time with it
We played Panda Spin at different player counts and found that it works well across the board, though we thought it had the most energy with four or five players. With more people, tricks become a bit more unpredictable, more cards flip, and there’s more room for dramatic reversals.
The first couple of rounds tend to be slow. Everyone had to learn the combinations and figure out when flipping cards was actually useful. But once that clicked, the pace picked up and the tension became more interesting.
One thing that stood out was how much planning goes into when you want to lose. That’s not something you say in many games. It’s often worth giving up a trick early on just to get stronger cards for later. That mechanic alone adds a lot of nuance.
The panda mood also gave us some funny moments, though it’s not always strategic. In hungry panda mode, people would hesitate before playing a panda symbol, not wanting to poke the bear, so to speak. In spin panda mode, everyone was trying to time their plays to trigger free flips.
Not every round was perfect though. In one session, a player got stuck with a bad hand and never really had a good moment to turn it around. They spent the whole round trying to get something going, but kept getting shut out by stronger combinations. That kind of situation isn’t common, but when it happens, it’s hard to enjoy.
Still, most of the time, the flow of the game was engaging. There were plenty of moments where a hand looked useless, then became powerful just two tricks later. When things go well, it feels satisfying. Not because you’re dominating the table, but because you managed to time your losses and recover.
A few players compared it to Scout, and I can see why. It has that similar feel of evolving your hand mid-round, but Panda Spin brings more layers, a bit more structure, and more ways to interact.
Final thoughts
Panda Spin is one of those games that doesn’t make a big splash but quietly earns your attention. It’s thoughtful, a bit quirky, and definitely different. If you enjoy trick-taking games with a tactical angle and a bit of hand management, this could be something to try.
It’s probably not the best choice for total beginners. There’s some terminology to learn and a few mechanics that only start to make sense after a game or two. But once players understand how the flipping works and how to time their plays, it becomes quite rewarding.
It also manages to be one of Carl Chudyk’s more accessible designs. It keeps a bit of that experimental spirit he’s known for, but in a format that’s easier to teach and quicker to get to the table.
That said, it’s not flawless. Some rounds can feel a bit off if you don’t get the right mix of cards or if you can’t get into the rhythm of flipping. And not every effect feels equally impactful. The element cards, for example, can sometimes just sit in your hand with no clear chance to play them.
Even so, we enjoyed our time with it. It’s not the kind of game we’d bring out every week, but it’s clever enough that we’d keep it around and bring it out when we want something a bit different. It looks light at first, but there’s more going on once you find the rhythm.
And yes, the panda in the robe is quite charming.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Matagot for review.
