From the Kitchen

The test we use: did it come back out a second night?

There’s a moment, near the end of a game night, when you start putting everything back in the box. If someone says “wait, one more round” — that’s the signal. We call it the second-night test.

King Panda Games started around our kitchen table in 2024. We’d been playing board games for years — as a family, as couples, with friends who barely knew the rules — and we kept running into the same problem: the internet is full of reviews written by people who play 200+ games a year and have very strong feelings about worker placement mechanics. We don’t. We just want to know if a game is actually fun to play with the people in our lives.

So we built the site we wished existed. Every review is written after at least two plays with real people — not just solo sessions or demo copies. We try to give you an honest answer to the question you’re actually asking: should I spend $40 and two hours of my family’s Saturday on this?

“We played 41 games this month around the kitchen table — these are the ones that came back out a second night.”

We rate games on two scales: bamboo (how easy it is to learn and teach — lower is simpler) and pandas (how much fun we actually had). A game can be complex and fun, or simple and brilliant. We try to capture both.

We keep the site small on purpose. We’d rather write one genuinely useful review than ten thin ones. If we haven’t played it enough to say something real about it, we don’t publish.

If you have a game you want us to look at, or a question about what to buy, send us a note. We read everything.

— Sam, founder  ·  King Panda Games