Kodama Duo

About this board game

Kodama Duo is a two-player card placement game that plays in about 30 minutes, inviting players to grow welcoming trees for their Kodama, the tree spirits.

Across three seasons and 12 turns, one Decree card is revealed each season to establish its unique conditions. During each Growing Phase, players build their trees by dividing and selecting branch cards, looking for clever arrangements that create a happy home and improve future scoring opportunities.

• One player reveals three branch cards and splits them into two piles.
• The other player chooses a pile, while the remaining pile goes to the splitter.
• Both players add one received branch card to their trees; any extra card is discarded.
• The player who did not receive the discarded branch card takes a spirit token matching one of its features.

Spirit tokens add a distinctive twist to the original Kodama rules. Each token represents one of the six features found in Kodama, and placing it over an icon on your tree can shorten or lengthen feature chains. These changes create new ways to shape your tree and increase the scoring potential of later branch placements.

After the Growing Phase, each player chooses one Kodama to score and live in their tree. New Kodama and Decree cards interact with both the spirit tokens and the splitter-and-chooser system, giving the game a fresh take on its familiar tree-growing foundations.

Kodama Duo also serves as a sixth-player expansion for Kodama: The Tree Spirits. Its updated selection rules use a simultaneous draft from four branch cards, while players can place and score their cards at the same time to reduce downtime in larger games.