Build a tropical paradise where adorable animals gather around towering palm trees.

Kentia is a strategic placement game for 2–4 players set on a lush tropical island. Animals have arrived on the shore and players compete to settle them into thriving communities around towering palm trees. Over the course of roughly 60 minutes, the board transforms into a vivid diorama of colourful animal meeples clustered beneath swaying palms — a table presence designed to rival games like Yamatai and Everdell. But beneath the charm is a sharp spatial puzzle with real teeth.

At its core, Kentia runs on a single elegant system: a deck of animal pair cards that serve double duty. Play a card to place both animals onto the board in order, building your settlements outward. Or sacrifice cards for their coin value to construct palm trees — laying a base, stacking trunk sections, and ultimately crowning your tree with a canopy to lock in your score. Every card drawn presents a genuine dilemma: do you want it for the animals it offers, or for the purchasing power it represents? This dual-use economy keeps decision density high while the rules stay teachable in under ten minutes. A Suguru-inspired adjacency constraint — no two animals of the same type can sit orthogonally adjacent anywhere on the board — ensures that every placement tightens the shared space for everyone, creating organic interaction without direct conflict.

What makes Kentia distinctive for a publisher is the combination of approachable weight with genuine strategic depth and an unmistakable shelf presence. The five animal types come in different physical sizes — from tiny 1×1 monkeys up to 2×2 elephants — and the completed board of stacked palm trees surrounded by animal clusters creates a three-dimensional scene unlike anything else on the market. The card economy has been validated through extensive simulation: play-to-discard ratios sit in the ideal tension zone, games are consistently close, and variable starting resources solve first-player advantage cleanly. The canopy card market adds replayability through four scoring categories that reward different strategic paths each game.

Kentia is aimed at the gateway-plus audience — players who love Cascadero, Blue Lagoon, or Babylonia and want a game that's easy to learn but rewards sharp spatial thinking. It offers the visual spectacle of a production-heavy game with the mechanical elegance of a Knizia design, filling a gap in the market for games that are simultaneously beautiful objects and tight competitive puzzles.