The seven panda clans are gathering for an annual competition where the bravest of all pandas battle for honour and glory.
While that happens to be the theme of the board game Panda Royale, it really doesn’t matter all that much. What does matter is that this is a great engine building, dice drafting, roll and write game that you can play with up to ten players and which has been a huge hit here in Windsor.
Disclosure: Thanks to Last Night Games for letting us take home one of their demo copies of Panda Royal from Origins. Some links in this post are affiliate links, using them costs you nothing extra and helps support this website. As an Amazon associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
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What is Panda Royale the dice game?
Panda Royal comes from bothers Nathan and Jake Jenne and was published through their own indie publishing company, Last Night Games.
This is a dice drafting game featuring over one-hundred custom dice in seven different colours. With a single copy of the game let’s you play with two to ten players, though I could see playing solo and just trying to beat your high score as well. There’s also the option to up the player count by purchasing additional copies of the game.
Games of Panda Royale are nice and quick taking under half an hour, even on your first learning game. The mechanics are super simple and because of this, the game is great for gamers of almost any age. As long as you can add, subtract, and multiply, you can play this game. If that’s too much you can always use a calculator (and you may want one for totaling your end game score anyway).
Thematically, in Panda Royale you are a panda elder who is attending the mid-summer festival which gathers all seven panda clans together. Part of this festival is a big battle for honour and glory and your task is to assemble your own team of panda warriors. Each of the clans is represented by a different colour of die and each clan has its own special way of scoring. Mechanically this battle is recreated by rolling all of your dice and then scoring them, drafting a new die, rolling your growing poll of dice, scoring them, and repeating that for ten rounds total.
Unfortunately this doesn’t feel anything like a big panda battle. This is a game about dice, lots of pretty, shiny dice. The only thing that says pandas is the panda head shaped first player marker, the art on the box, and the intro in the rulebook.
The main components in Panda Royal are dice. You get over a hundred polyhedrons ranging from D6s up to D20s. These are all standard RPG style dice in various colours which denote how they work in the game. The only unique aspect here is that half of the numbers on the red dice are black and half are white.
You also get a two sided scoring pad, two bags to sort your dice, some pencils (with erasers), and a short clear rulebook. The rulebook is short enough you could cut the shrink on the game and read it in the time it takes for the other players to look over the different dice when sitting down for your first game.
The component quality in Panda Royale is a step above what you would expect, mainly due to the inclusion of two dice bags. One is smaller and is just used to separate the dice you need to set up at the start of the game while the larger one is for the rest. It’s a nice touch and helps to get the game going right away. However you do need to make sure everything gets put away correctly at the end of the game, or you’ll lose out on that quick set up.
Let the Panda Battles Begin, how Panda Royal Plays
A game of Panda Royal starts with everyone taking a score pad. noting down their name and collecting one yellow D6.
Each round players will roll all of their dice and then use the scoring sheet to total them. Each type of die scores differently.
I like to call the Yellow dice, which are the kind that you start with, the Initiative Dice. This is because your total on all of your yellow dice determines your order for the next steps. After rolling the player with the highest yellow total takes the Panda Token. During the first round you reroll any ties. In later rounds, if there is a tie the token goes to player sitting closest to the left of the player who had the panda last round.
The next step (which is skipped for the first round) is that Pink D12 “pity dice” are handed out to the players with the lowest total score for that round. Then if anyone has any white dice they can trade them for another player’s dice, one for one. Of course, doing this gives your opponent a white die that they can then use to steal a die for themselves on the next turn. This can lead to a lot of back and forth and some amusing moments.
Finally, the last step of each round in Panda Royale is that a number of dice equal to the player count plus one are pulled from the bag and each player drafts one die. The drafting order is set by the player’s yellow dice total from highest to lowest. Ties are broken by player order starting with the player with the Panda token.
Note the dice to be drafted aren’t rolled, their values don’t matter at this point. They will be rolled by the players who draft them at the start of the next round.
The dice to be drafted come in seven colours, each of which scores differently. Yellow dice help you draft first, as I just mentioned, but are only worth their face value. The Pink “pity dice”, which are meant as a small catch up mechanic, are all D12s and score whatever you roll on them.
Purple dice are always doubled. Blue dice just score their face value, that is unless you have collected a sparkly blue die. If you have a sparkly blue die all of your blue dice are doubled including the sparkly ones. Note you only need one sparkly blue die, having more than one doesn’t affect their value (but may help if people start stealing your dice later).
For the green dice you just score what you roll. However they are all D20s so they have the potential to roll higher than all of the other dice, even when doubled. The clear dice are spies, they are all D6s and only score what you roll on them but then let you steal other people’s dice just before the drafting round.
The most complicated dice you will find in Panda Royale are the Red ones. Each red die has numbers in two colours, white and black, split evenly.
To get a total for the red dice, you add up any white numbers, subtract any black numbers, and then multiply the total by the number of red dice you rolled (and yes this can lead to a negative score).
And that’s it. Roll your dice, add them up, draft a new die, and repeat 10 times. Total up everyone’s score and the player with the most points wins.
One nice touch I haven’t mentioned is that the score sheet is colour coded and lists how to score each die type so you don’t have to remember all of this while playing. If you ever run out of the sheets that come in the box, you can find Printable Black and White Panda Royale Scoresheets on the Last Night Games website.
Panda Royale is a fantastic high player count roll and write, just don’t expect much from the theme.
I love the simplicity in Panda Royale. The straight forward mechanics make the game both dead simple to teach as well as to learn. This makes it accessible to gamers of almost any age and experience level. This simplicity may lead you to think the game is too basic or that there’s not enough going on and that’s just not true.
What I’m not sure comes through in my rules overview is just how many decision points there are in this game and how much player agency you have when playing Panda Royale. This isn’t just Yahtzee or Farkle, with fancy dice.
Panda Royale is an engine builder, one where you will be drafting dice to try to improve your die pool with lots of options along the way. Do you take a chance on red dice hoping for a big score at the risk of maybe losing some points along the way or do you play it safe and stick to purple dice? Should you try to build a massive pool of blue dice, making sure you have a least one or two glitter dice so their doubled or do you take a chance on getting a bunch of green D20s and hoping your roll high?
Along with the engine building, Panda Royale is also a push your luck game, but it’s one where you get to manage your risk and get to choose how much you want to push depending on which dice you draft. I really like how Panda Royal makes it feel like the choices I make matter, even when the game is pretty random.
Yes, randomness is very much a thing in Panda Royale. This is a dice game after all, with all kinds of dice of different sizes. Added to that is the fact that you are also drafting dice from a bag, which limits which dice you have to chose from.
Even if you think you’ve got the perfect strategy and a ton of dice that will double every round, you can still end up rolling all ones and twos. In our last game one player had three yellow dice, their starting D6 plus two D8s, and still managed to roll a three for initiative.
One thing you won’t find in Panda Royale is any way to manipulate the values of the dice. That’s just not part of the game, there are no modifiers or re-rolls or anything like that. You roll all of your dice every turn and then you are stuck with what you get.
Personally I love this mix of player agency and randomness. The designers have hit the perfect balance here. There are choices that matter. Paying attention to what other people at the table are going for matters, hate drafting matters, even to an extent bluffing matters, but with all of that there’s still the randomness of the dice.
Another aspect I like about Panda Royale is how portable it is and the fact that it can basically be played anywhere you can roll dice. We’ve had the game out on our kitchen table, we’ve played it on small round coffee shop tables, and I’ve even played a few two player games in a restaurant using the box lid and bottom as dice trays. We’ve also used the box to play sitting in the grass at a park.
We first played this game at Origins game fair and I had to convince Deanna to sit down and play it. To be honest, I almost skipped over it myself thinking it was another simple math based roll and write, but once one of the designers explained the drafting mechanics and how each die scores different I was intrigued. Once I sat down and played through a game I knew I had to bring this one home.
What I didn’t expect is just how popular Panda Royale would be with everyone I’ve shown it to. I’ve brought the game to various local events and it’s been a hit at each one. One of the biggest draws is that the game plays up to ten, so it lets large groups actually play games together and is great for getting different groups of players to play something together.
Both of our kids love this game, with my youngest asking to play it often. Even my heavy gamer friends insisted we play a couple of games in a row at my birthday party this year. Sean really loves the fact that you can play this game very casually or you can sit there and figure out the odds of every roll. To him it has the prefect balance of casual and thinky. That said, Panda Royale is not for everyone.
While Deanna will play it, it’s really not her kind of game. This is going to be true for anyone who hates to lose a game due to luck. You can play this game perfectly, making the optimal choice every round, and still lose. That will be a turn off for some people.
The other thing that may turn people off of Panda Royale is just how abstract the entire thing is. This is a dice drafting roll and write that happens to have a silly panda theme. There is nothing in the mechanics that makes this game feel like you are battling pandas. You are drafting and rolling dice, and the fact that the colour of dice determines how you score it doesn’t really make me feel like I’m collecting bears from different clans. I think a panda fan playing this game is going to be disappointed the first time they sit down and see just how little that theme matters.
If you are looking for a light, easy to teach, easy to learn, quick playing dice game where your decisions actually matter, you need to check out Panda Royale. Unlike some of the other dice games we’ve looked at, this one features a ton of player agency.
You should also check out Panda Royale if you dig engine building games. While it’s no Terraforming Mars or Wingspan, this game does give you a feel of things ramping up, and you will feel the impact of your earlier decisions on later turns. Which is something you don’t usually get from a dice heavy game like this.
If randomness is not your thing, you probably want to stay away. As is to be expected of any game with one hundred dice in it, Panda Royale can be extremely random. While your decisions do matter, this game is not a test of intellect where you can use perfect information to out play your opponents.
If you enjoy some casual gaming with friends (up to ten of them per copy of the game) and you want a game you can play while having a conversation and just hanging out, Panda Royale is a great choice. It’s also a great choice for non-hobby gamers and family gatherings, especially for those family members who are scared of modern board games.
There is one more group that may be interested in Panda Royale, the dice collectors. Be aware though, while you get about one-hundred dice in this box, they are nothing special. These are pretty standard, Chessex-style, plastic polyhedrals. Most are clear (except for the sparkly blue D6) and there aren’t any funky patterns, or sharp edges to be found.
FAQs
Is Panda Royale a good game for a panda lover?
While the game does have a theme of battling pandas, that theme doesn’t really come out in the gameplay. This is a purely abstract roll and write game that happens to have the word Panda in it’s name.
Can I play Panda Royal with more than 10 players?
One of the great things about this game is that it’s expandable. Each copy you pick up lets you play with 10 more players. With 10 boxes you could have a 100 player game.
How hard is the math in Panda Royale?
Panda Royal features basic math, adding, subtracting and multiplying. The hardest math in the game comes when you are adding up the red dice which, depending on how they roll, can be positive or negative, and then multiplying that total by the number of red dice you have.
That’s it for our look at Panda Royale, a game that proved to be more than what it first appeared to be. It’s something more engaging than a standard roll and write with funky dice. This is a highly random game that still features a lot of player agency, while still being great for a casual game night.
- Fast-Paced: Panda Royale is a quick dice game that plays in just 20-30 minutes even with a group of 10 players. It’s the perfect game for any family gathering or regular game night. With subtle strategy and lots of social player interaction, every game you play is a unique experience.
