Iki is a beautiful, lavishly designed game about wandering through a marketplace in historical Edo-era Japan, with an interesting spin on the tried-and-true worker placement mechanism. Normally in worker placement games, players start with a handful of workers and they compete to place them on the board in the spaces that will benefit them the most, usually by giving them a resource they need in order to buy assets that will in turn generate victory points. Iki more or less does that too, but in this case, players are only placing one worker on a turn.
Each player has two primary game pieces: an Oyakata and an Ikizama. Rather than being picked up and placed somehere new each turn (as with most worker placement games), the Oyakata remains on the board moving in a linear loop from turn to turn. Each space offers actions such as buying or selling rice and wood, buying fish, or building up firefighting ability (apparently fires were a huge problem in the crowded marketplaces of old), which among other things determines who goes first each round. Additionally, players will place cards on the representing artisans who add additional options to the space where they are placed. So the position of a player's Oyakata is important, and controlling how far it moves each turn is critical.
The Ikizama behaves more like a traditional worker placement piece. At the start of each round, players place their Ikizama piece on one of five possible spaces. These spaces determine how far that player's Oyakata will move on this round, either 1, 2, 3, or 4 spaces, with a fifth choice that allows the Oyakata to move anywhere from 1 to 4 spaces. These numbers indicate exactly how far that player will move their Oyakata, and only one player may place their Ikizama on each space -- this is where we see the normal worker placement competition. The fifth space allows a player to move their Oyakata anywhere from one to four spaces, but at the cost of forfeiting part of their turn -- they won't be able to place a new artisan card. Players can collect Sandal tokens from various sources that can be spent to add to their Oyakata's movement, which allows for a little wiggle room.
It's an interesting combination of elements because it gives the player different things to think about when planning their turn: how far do I need to move to accomplish the task I want to for this turn, and how can I make the most of my turn if I can't get to the market space I wanted? These are common conundrums in worker placement games, but Iki offers some different mechanisms for getting there, and as a result the game feels a little fresher than more traditional fare like Lords of Waterdeep or DinoGenics.
Players score victory points by collecting sets of retired artisans, which points to another interesting element of the game. Each round, players have the option to hire artisans, strategically placing them to make board spaces more useful to land on. These artisan cards also provide resources to their owners during an income phase that happens once every three turns. Each time an opponent uses one of your artisans, they gain experience which changes the income they give but also gets them closer to retirement -- after a certain amount of experience, the artisan card leaves the board for its owner's player area, where it continues to generate income and also contributes towards victory points based on the number of different types of artisan cards a player collects.
In addition to collecting retirees, players can score bonus points by purchasing fish, pipes and tobacco (an oddly specific collection of cultural items) and also by spending resources to add building cards to the board. Buildings take up artisan spaces, but instead of offering an action they generally give end-of-game bonus points, so they're a trade-off but give players something to work towards. As if that weren't enough to keep track of, buildings and artisans are vulnerable to the dreaded fire, which is the game's way of occasionally clearing the board to keep things from getting stale.
At three points throughout the game, a fire starts in a random corner of the board, removing building and artisan cards unless the card's owner has sufficiently built up their firefighting ability, which they do mainly by playing artisan cards to the board and by visiting certain board spaces. A player's firefighting number also determines where they go in the turn order each round, so they have extra incentive to keep this number moving forward over the course of the game.
Akebono, an expansion that appears to have been unfortunately underprinted and is a little difficult to find, adds a riverfront where players can build boats that act similarly to the artisan cards, providing resources to any player that cares to use them and letting their owners rack up a "trade score" that provides bonuses at various points in the game. It also adds a board to better keep track of which artisans and buildings are available.
- Iki: A Game of Edo Artisans official website
- Iki: A Game of Edo Artisans on boardgamegeek