Kigi is a rare blend of artistic arrangement and strategic game play, wrapped into a $9 price tag. Game play is fairly simple - build an artistic rendering of a beautiful tree using non-grid card placement. That means that as long as you're constructing a viable looking tree, you can place cards anywhere! It's a great way to break out of the traditional mode of tile or card building games. Branches will spring up from your root tree in amazing and strange directions as you try to accumulate points. You earn points by stringing together consecutive elements - colorful flowers or artistic bugs.

The game encourages interaction as you can add to your own tree, or to other players. Add in a card collection element where you can prune branches 10 cards long or longer and throw in some interesting goals players can acquire along the way and you have a fantastic game. Highly replayable, full of interesting choices and simple play leading to more complex strategies. My 9 year old absolutely adores this game and it also makes a great addition to the table when it's the older crowd playing.

Kigi takes about 15-20 minutes to play once you get through your initial learning game. It has the added bonus of taking existing cards and creating new, flowing pieces of art right on your game table even as you're working to outscore other players and earn the most precious thing of all - points.