Bunny Kingdom Town – More Than Just Bunny Kingdom for Two

When I first heard about Bunny Kingdom Town, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. The original Bunny Kingdom is a game about expanding across a large kingdom, claiming territories, and building fiefs. This one goes in a different direction. Instead of managing a kingdom, you’re building a single town together with one other player and trying to come out on top.

It’s a dedicated two-player game from Richard Garfield, and I was curious to see what a Bunny Kingdom game built specifically for two players would actually look like. Plenty of games get a two-player mode added later. This one was designed for exactly two people from the start.

In Bunny Kingdom Town, two rival bunny families have been given the chance to found a new settlement. Over four rounds, you’ll draft buildings, buy plots, connect neighbourhoods, collect resources, and try to earn the most golden carrots.

At first glance it looks cheerful, colourful, and fairly relaxed. Then you sit down and realise the bunny across the table keeps taking the exact building you were hoping for. Suddenly you’re paying a lot more attention to what they’re doing than you expected. The artwork may suggest a peaceful little town-building game, but there’s a competitive game hiding underneath all those carrots and rabbit ears.

👥 2 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designer: Richard Garfield
🎨 Artwork: Jiahui Eva Gao

🏢 Publisher: IELLO Games (review copy provided)

Gameplay Overview

A game of Bunny Kingdom Town lasts four rounds. At the start of each round, players receive coins, five new building tiles are revealed, and everyone draws two request cards. You keep one and discard the other. These request cards stay hidden until the end of the game and can provide valuable bonus points if you’ve managed to meet their requirements.

Every turn starts with the mandatory plan action, where you choose one building tile from the shared display and add it to your reserve. The choice often goes beyond simply taking the tile that helps you the most. Many turns involve looking at a building and deciding that, even if it isn’t perfect for you, it’s probably too good to leave behind for your opponent. Since buildings aren’t replaced until the next round, every pick changes the options available to both players.

After planning, you can start building. To place a building, you first need to buy an available plot from the market. Each plot corresponds to a location on the town board. Some plots are expensive, some are free, and their prices gradually decrease as they move along the market track. A plot that feels too expensive now may become a bargain later, assuming the other player doesn’t grab it first.

Once you’ve bought a plot, you place one of your buildings there. Most buildings can go anywhere, while others require specific locations, such as spaces next to water. You don’t have to build a tile immediately after drafting it either. Holding onto buildings for a future turn is often just as important as placing them right away.

Players can also construct multiple buildings during a turn, although every extra building costs an additional coin. That might sound minor, but money is usually tighter than it first appears, so even small spending decisions can have consequences later.

The main goal is creating neighbourhoods. These are groups of adjacent buildings you control. Whenever a building is added, the neighbourhood activates, potentially generating resources, bridges, request cards, or other bonuses.

After that comes scoring. Influence is calculated by multiplying the number of active stars in the neighbourhood by the number of different building types it contains. We quickly learned that a huge neighbourhood full of similar buildings often scored worse than a smaller district with a good mix of services. The game constantly nudges players towards building diverse communities rather than simply grabbing as much space as possible.

There’s also an upgrade system. Throughout the game you’ll collect wood, which can be spent on permanent upgrades that improve your economy, scoring opportunities, or flexibility. Since you’re limited to three upgrades for the entire game, the choices never become overwhelming, but they can still have a noticeable impact on how you approach the rest of the game.

After four rounds, players reveal their request cards, score any completed objectives, and count up their golden carrots. The player with the most carrots wins.

Artwork, Components, and Visual Design

The first thing you’ll notice is that Bunny Kingdom Town looks exactly like a Bunny Kingdom game should. It’s colourful, cheerful, and packed with rabbits doing rabbit things.

The artwork has a lot of personality without becoming difficult to read. Markets, workshops, parks, theatres, houses, and fountains all help create the feeling of a growing community. There’s a lot of colour on the table, but the game generally stays clear even once the town begins to fill up.

The town board is probably my favourite visual element. At the beginning of the game it’s mostly empty space. By the end, it’s covered with buildings, bridges, and connected neighbourhoods stretching across the map. Watching the town gradually develop over the course of the game helps the settlement feel like something you’ve actually built rather than just a collection of scoring opportunities. By the end of a game, it’s easy to look across the board and recognise the neighbourhoods that grew naturally and the ones that were clearly thrown together in a desperate hunt for points.

The bunny meeples deserve a mention too. They’re large, easy to spot, and full of character. Sometimes publishers seem determined to reinvent wooden components, but here they simply made bunny-shaped meeples that look good and do their job well.

Nothing in the box felt cheap or flimsy, and after several games we didn’t have any complaints about the physical production. During our first game we occasionally had to double-check some spaces and river connections on the board, but that became much less of an issue once we knew what we were looking at.

The game never feels like it’s relying on fancy components to make an impression. I never found myself thinking that it needed miniatures or oversized pieces. The artwork, the growing town, and the colourful neighbourhoods already give it plenty of presence on the table.

Our Experience

What surprised us most after our first few plays was that Bunny Kingdom Town doesn’t really feel like a smaller version of Bunny Kingdom. The theme may be familiar, but the experience is quite different. Rather than expanding across a large map, everything revolves around a shared town where both players are constantly competing over the same opportunities. Almost every decision feels connected to what the other player is doing.

The part we enjoyed most was the timing. Drafting a building is only the beginning. The more interesting decision is often what happens afterwards. Do you build immediately? Do you keep the tile for later? Do you pay extra for the perfect plot, or do you wait and hope it becomes cheaper? Many turns involved looking at a plot and convincing ourselves it would still be there next round.

Sometimes that worked. Sometimes it really didn’t.

One game was practically decided because somebody waited one turn too long for a cheaper plot. I won’t name names. Mostly because it was me.

The neighbourhood scoring system was probably our favourite mechanism in the game. We liked that it avoids a simple “bigger is better” approach. Several times we found ourselves investing in a smaller neighbourhood simply because adding another building type would increase its score more efficiently. It also meant that the board often developed in unexpected ways. A district that looked unimpressive halfway through the game could suddenly become one of the strongest scoring areas on the board.

The economy ended up playing a bigger role than we expected as well. Coins are needed for plots, but they’re also needed if you want to build multiple times in a turn. Because of that, we were constantly weighing immediate gains against future opportunities. The upgrades fit naturally into that puzzle. We liked that they nudged us in a direction without completely deciding our strategy for us. Some games we focused more on scoring, while in others we concentrated on resources or flexibility.

We had more mixed feelings about the request cards. We liked that they stop the game from becoming completely predictable. Most of the scoring is visible throughout the game, but those hidden objectives mean there’s always a little uncertainty heading into the final scoring. At the same time, some requests felt easier to complete than others depending on how the game had already developed. It never felt unfair, but it did add a level of luck that players should be aware of.

One thing that stood out throughout all of our plays was how much interaction there is beneath the friendly artwork. This isn’t an aggressive game, but it’s definitely competitive. Players can deny useful buildings, race for valuable plots, compete for locations, and occasionally interfere with plans that have been developing for several turns. Anyone expecting a relaxed city-building experience may be surprised by how often the game asks you to pay attention to what your opponent is doing.

By the time final scoring arrived, the game usually felt ready to end. We almost always had one or two things we wished we’d done differently, but we weren’t left wishing for another round. More importantly, we often found ourselves talking about decisions afterwards, especially the turns that seemed insignificant at the time but ended up shaping the rest of the game.

Our Thoughts

After quite a few plays, what stood out most wasn’t any individual mechanism. Drafting buildings is familiar. Buying plots is familiar. Hidden objectives are familiar. The interesting part is how often those systems pull against each other. Just when you think you’ve found the perfect place to build, a plot disappears, a building gets drafted, or a request card pushes you in a different direction.

One of the game’s strengths is how approachable it remains. We never felt like we were spending half the game checking iconography or searching through the rulebook, even during our early plays. The rules are relatively easy to explain, but the decisions themselves remain engaging because you’re usually choosing between several reasonable options rather than one obvious answer.

The game is also more tactical than strategic, and that’s an important thing for potential players to know. If you enjoy creating a detailed plan at the start of a game and following it all the way through, Bunny Kingdom Town may occasionally frustrate you. Buildings, plots, upgrades, and objectives appear in ways that regularly encourage you to adjust your approach.

The scoring system may also be slightly intimidating for more casual players. Between active stars, building types, upgrades, and future connections, there are moments where the game feels more mathematical than thematic. The rabbit town provides a charming setting, but beneath that presentation lies a game that’s largely about efficiency and optimisation.

Replayability is probably the biggest question we still have. There is certainly variety here. Different setup cards, upgrade combinations, request cards, and building selections ensure that games won’t play out exactly the same way. At the same time, the central challenge remains largely unchanged. You’re still trying to create efficient neighbourhoods, manage your resources, and maximise your scoring opportunities. Whether that remains fresh over dozens of plays will depend heavily on how much you enjoy that core puzzle.

The overall design deserves credit, though. The plot market, neighbourhood scoring, upgrades, and request cards all feel connected rather than existing as separate systems. As the game progresses, you gradually move from simply trying to place buildings efficiently to planning larger scoring opportunities and managing limited resources more carefully. The game has a satisfying arc, and very little feels unnecessary.

Is Bunny Kingdom Town going to become our favourite two-player game of all time? Probably not. What it does offer is a game where almost every turn asks the same question in a slightly different way: do you take what’s available now, or do you wait for something better? That idea runs through the entire design, from drafting buildings to buying plots and choosing upgrades. That’s what kept the game enjoyable across multiple plays.

Bunny Kingdom Town left a genuinely positive impression. It feels like a game that knows exactly where it wants players to spend their attention: on the board, on the market, and on the decisions they’re making every turn. Not every two-player game needs to become a lifelong favourite. Sometimes you just want a game that gets to the table easily, creates interesting situations, and leaves both players thinking about what they could have done differently. Bunny Kingdom Town did exactly that, and I can easily see it returning to our table.

Just don’t let the cute rabbits fool you. Behind all those carrots and cheerful artwork is a surprisingly determined little town-builder.

📝 We received a review copy of Bunny Kingdom Town from IELLO.