Dreamworks Kung Fu Panda The Board Game

Kung Fu Panda: The Board Game is one of frantically rolling dice against the clock. While the box describes it as a cooperative game, it’s cooperative in the way a bouncy castle is a team sport. You move your characters through each scene using dice rolls, spending and saving matching rolls against the task at hand. That could be a simple single movement roll to enter an open room, or matching harder rolls to break down a wall or climb on to a rooftop. You do all of this as fast as you can while a sand-timer trickles away.  This speed can be your undoing of course, as rolling the claw symbol ends up moving your dial on one more segment, which in turn can trigger further enemy spawns or damage your hero. The way this all comes out on the board is a lot of shouting what you’re trying to roll so that someone else doesn’t aim for the same target, a loud clattering of dice, and snatching away defeated enemies from the board and placing new ones as they spawn.

It’s a kind of chaotic, fun nonsense which ends up feeling like the more kinetic scenes of the films. This is reflected in board states are all set out for you nicely in the rule book, so a variety of authentic feeling missions can be tackled straight out of the box. Some are ingenious, like a scenario where you’re taking part in a rickshaw chase in which the play area extends as the chase continues, while others do feel a little samey with repeated objectives from one mission to another.