Quick review: Takenoko

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/70919/takenoko

Ghoti showed me the Bamboo/Panda game! It was really nice. Each turn you have two actions, plus a random bonus. These can be, "Place new large hex tile", "move panda", "move gardener", "take irrigation", or "take goal card".

The board is completely symmetric between players, there are no pieces which are specific to one player, the only difference is which goal cards they drew. The hex tiles are paddies of three colours, which when irrigated, grow a stalk of bamboo of that colour. When the gardener moves, he/she grows more bamboo on that hex if it's irrigated, plus adjacent hexes of the same colour if they're irrigated. The panda eats one segment of bamboo (you get that).

Goals are either "these segments of bamboo" (which you trade in), or "this combination of bamboo stalks anywhere on the board" or "this arrangement of hexes (must be irrigated)". The last two, you can score on your turn whenever they're satisfied, it doesn't matter if you laid them or your opponent laid them or someone scored them earlier, just if they exist.

The towers of bamboo are really cute, little plastic segments which stack four high. The panda is very cute, though when the game was described to me, I imagined it a lot bigger :)

And after the first few turns, it started to go quickly, each turn, there's only a couple of things you can do so there's not that much to decide, but the aggregate effect of your decisions matters a lot.

Things in Amsterdam

What did I see?

Rijksmuseum

The most famous gallery, I think. Some Van Gogh, Rembrant and Vermeer, and many other artists, including several I quite liked. Many faces which looked like FACES, not paintings.

Apparently Mondrian painted actual landscapes with windmills really well, as well as surprisingly artistic coloured squares! :) And in the 1900-1950 top floor, there's a whole plane!

The basement had temporary exhibitions, including large scale models of scores of Dutch navy ships, back when that was better than draughtsman drawings for recording HOW they were built.

It's very strange that taking photos (without flash, non-commercial) seems just normal -- in the UK I'm used to photos being forbidden for SOME reason.

Go in winter, in summer its impossibly crowded, you often can't even get in.

Science Centre

Full of hands on stuff which I usually love but wasn't in the mood for.

A couple of awesome things. A 20 ft tall water clock I linked to before, with a pendulum, and some magic way that the minutes tube emptying triggers the syphon action in the hours tube, um, somehow, even though they're only connected together at the bottom. I was lucky enough to be there at noon :)

And a factory system I still don't understand with a dozen workstations, where people could work sort-of together trying to sort coloured balls into containers, with a mix of "get delivered a container, sort the balls according to weight" and "use touchscreen to reconfigure a switch in the pneumatic system".

Harbour

Just outside the science centre are a collection of restored ships, AIUI by people whose hobby it was to buy them and restore them to specific period (they'd often been working in the meantime), and basically just taken over this corner of the harbour, which is now official.

Microbe Museum

Awesome, but maybe because I went with Rachel :)