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Cherry Blossoms & Bamboo is a modular expansion for Evergreen that adds two new plant types. On paper that sounds small. In practice it nudges a lot of the decisions you make in the base game. Not by adding extra phases or complicated rules, but by messing with how you value cards, fertility, and shadows.
You swap one or two powers out during setup, shuffle the new cards in, and that’s basically it. The game still runs the same. Same drafting, same seasons, same sunlight puzzle. But once these plants are in the mix, some cards suddenly feel dangerous to leave behind, and others look way more tempting than before.
I guess the easiest way to say it is this. It’s not a new Evergreen. It’s Evergreen with sharper edges.
👥 1-4 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 45 minutes
📝 Designer: Hjalmar Hach
🎨 Artwork: Wenyi Geng & Giulia Ghigini
🏢 Publisher: Horrible Guild (review copy provided)
About the base game
If you haven’t played Evergreen, the core idea is pretty simple. You’re building a little planet by planting sprouts and growing them into trees across different biomes. Each round you draft a biome card. That card tells you where you’re allowed to grow and which power you can use. The cards nobody takes aren’t wasted. They build up fertility for their biome, and that becomes a big scoring factor at the end.
Sunlight direction matters a lot. At the end of each season you score trees that receive light, and you also score your biggest connected forest. Trees cast shadows depending on their size, so placement isn’t just about growing fast. It’s about not ruining your own future turns. It looks friendly on the table, but it asks more from you than it first appears.
After four seasons, fertility multiplies with the number of big trees in each biome. That’s where the big points swing happens. Highest score wins. Clean system, but somehow it keeps you second-guessing your own placements the whole game.
Gameplay overview of the Cherry Blossoms & Bamboo expansion
The cherry tree module pushes fertility to the front of the table. Some biome cards now include multiplier icons. When one of these cards gets left behind in the draft and sent to the fertility zone, that specific card counts as being worth more. Its value equals the total number of cards above and below it in the stack. It doesn’t boost the whole pile. It just makes that one card heavy. And if a stack grows tall, those multipliers can get out of hand pretty quickly
The cherry tree growth power lets you replace a sprout with a cherry tree. Cherry trees are height 1, cast a short shadow, and score 2 points when hit by light. On top of that, each cherry tree adds +1 fertility to its biome for you only. It doesn’t directly score points by itself. It just inflates that biome’s final value when scoring happens. They also count toward biggest forest, so they fit into the existing rules without needing extra exceptions.
The bamboo module does the opposite and introduces negative fertility. Some biome cards now count as −1 when they go into the fertility zone. A biome can actually dip below zero, which feels rude the first time it happens. The plant small bamboo power places a small bamboo on an empty space. At season end, before light scoring, any small bamboo hit by light immediately grows into big bamboo.
Small bamboo is height 1. Big bamboo is height 2. Neither scores light. Instead you score 2 points for each biome where you have at least one bamboo, and they count toward biggest forest like regular trees.
Cherry pushes you toward focused investment. Bamboo pushes you to spread wide. Together they change how players read the draft without rewriting the rulebook.
Artwork, components, and visual design
Evergreen already had a soft, pastel look, and the expansion leans into that instead of trying to stand out in a weird way.
The cherry trees are bright pink and impossible to miss. On a busy late game board they actually help readability because you can spot them instantly. It looks like someone dropped spring directly onto your planet. I’m not saying it’s subtle. But I am saying it’s pretty.
Bamboo has a nice physical progression. Small pieces are short and chunky, and big bamboo stacks upward in segments. You don’t need to double-check heights. You just look at the board and know what’s casting what shadow.
The cards match the base game style, which I appreciate. Nothing breaks the visual language. The extra icons don’t clutter the art either. It still looks like a gentle landscape builder, even when the scoring math underneath is doing a lot of work.
On the table the expansion adds color, but not noise. The pieces feel like they were always meant to be there. No “expansion plastic syndrome” where new parts look like they came from another game.
Our experience
The expansion made the draft feel way more loaded. We paid attention to what we left behind almost as much as what we took. Fertility stopped being background scoring and became an active argument at the table.
Cherry trees encouraged commitment. If someone locked into a biome early, you could see their plan forming. The private fertility boost is small on paper, but it snowballs when paired with multiplier cards. The best cherry turns layered systems together. Light points, forest scoring, fertility scaling. When it all lined up, it felt earned. When it didn’t, the trees were just… fine. Which I actually like. They’re not auto-win buttons.
Bamboo has a different energy. It grows fast and takes over space quickly, but it’s easy to misuse. Because it never scores light, it can sabotage your layout if you treat it like a normal tree. In a couple of our games someone built a proud bamboo skyline and then realized it was shading their real scoring trees. It was funny for everyone else. Less funny for them.
The draft also got a bit meaner, strategically speaking. Cherry multipliers and bamboo negatives matter most when they go untouched. That reinforces the base game’s central idea that what nobody takes still shapes the outcome. Denial drafting matters more now. Not brutally so, but enough that you feel it.
Accessibility shifts too. Bamboo gives newer players a simple scoring path. Spread out, cover biomes, collect steady points. Cherry asks for more planning and timing. It raises the ceiling more than the floor.
Late seasons look incredible, but they’re heavier to read. More shadows, more interactions, more long-term consequences. The board gets dense. If your group already struggles with analysis paralysis, this won’t help.
The good news is the rules overhead stays small. Teaching the expansion is easy once people know Evergreen. The extra weight comes from decisions, not procedures.
Our thoughts
Cherry Blossoms & Bamboo is for people who want more Evergreen, not a reinvention of it. It stretches the same puzzle instead of replacing it. If someone is hoping for a major twist, they might find it too familiar. If they want the base game to bite a little harder, this delivers.
What keeps it interesting long term is the modular structure. Cherry-only games feel different from bamboo-only games, and combining them creates its own rhythm. That variability makes repeat plays feel different enough to matter without making the rules messy.
There are trade-offs. Score swings can get wilder. A biome that snowballs with multipliers can dominate a game. Some players won’t enjoy how draft pressure increases. And the denser late game state takes more mental effort than the base box experience. I know a couple of people in our group who prefer Evergreen in its cleaner form.
What I appreciate most is that the expansion respects the original system. It doesn’t pile on extra tracks or side boards. It just leans harder on what was already there. More tension, same skeleton.
After a few plays it changes how you look at the base game. You start noticing draft choices and shadows you used to ignore. And I guess that’s the best compliment I can give it… we stopped thinking of it as an expansion and just started thinking of it as Evergreen.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Horrible Guild.
