An underrated gem: Iki, a game of Edo artisans

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.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Like the best games of this type, Iki combines a few different game mechanisms, gives them a new spin, and straddles that fine like between complex and complicated.

• Iki: A Game of Edo Artisans official website
• Iki: A Game of Edo Artisans on boardgamegeek

Toy soldiers, part 1: Ronin

Seven samurai, painted and ready to fight!

British publisher Osprey has long been a staple in wargaming circles for their long line of excellent books on military history, covering armies, weapons, and battles throughout history with an eye towards the kind of detail that tabletop miniatures players would want for their games. More recently they've started putting out a series of rule books for miniatures wargaming. For the most part these are stand-alone books that don't come in a box with a bunch of figures, or require the purchase of specific packs of miniatures and accompanying stat cards and tokens. Rather, they are designed to evoke a particular historical period or fictional genre, and the players are free to use whatever miniatures they wish.

Having taken the plunge into miniatures gaming with games like 7TV, Doctor Who: Exterminate!, and Mythic Battles: Pantheon, I wanted to find a samurai themed game to indulge my love of Kurosawa movies, and Ronin: Skirmish Wargames in the age of the Samurai looked like just the thing, although it was another year after buying the rulebook before I got around to buying and painting enough samurai miniatures to play the game with.

After assembling some suitable terrain (mostly of the print-and-play, cut-and-assemble variety) we finally set up to play a game, a simple "defend the bridge" scenario with bloodthirsty bandits on one side and noble Koryu (sword fighting teachers and students) on the other.

The game aims for a "cinematic" style of combat, and does some interesting things that other games of this type don't really do. A game where the majority of the combat will be hand-to-hand could be quite dull -- once the figures have been moved into position, it could quickly devolve into die rolls back and forth, but Ronin opts for something different.

At the start of a hand-to-hand battle, each player secretly chooses a number of tokens based on the experience level of his characters. There are two different tokens to choose from: attack or defense. Once the die rolling starts, these tokens can be spent to improve a character's chance of attacking or defending successfully. What this amounts to is that players are forced to choose whether they want to focus on defense, attack, or try to balance out the two.

As with most games of this type, ranged attackers have the huge advantage of being able to attack from a distance (and in this game they get to attack first), but the game balances that by giving them fewer opportunities to increase their chance of hitting, and it also takes into account the slow reload times of ranged weapons from this time period.

Games are scenario based, usually with a specific goal for one side or the other rather than just "run to the middle and fight," and the game does a good job of allowing for narrative actions like looting bodies and picking up objects. It also has a whole system covering morale and the idea that if the fight is going badly, the troops might start running away.

We really enjoyed the game, and my only complaint isn't really a flaw in the game but an element that could be seen by many as a plus. The game doesn't come with pre-made character cards like its more commercial cousins tend to. Players are given example character types, with options for different weapons and abilities. Character stats are then copied onto a simple roster form for use during play. It works fine and is well suited to this style of game, but at the same time (and this is a very superficial criticism) it's an element of the game that is dry and uninteresting. Additionally, the hand writing and pre-game decision making makes it more difficult to just jump in and start playing, which means we won't get this game to the table very often.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) A great game system that works fine as-is, but could benefit from some more lavish support materials and a shorter prep time.

• Ronin: Skirmish Wargames in the Age of the Samurai official website
• Ronin: Skirmish Wargames in the Age of the Samurai on BoardGameGeek

We could be heroes in Samurai Jack: Back to the Past

There are a vast number of games based on pre-existing film, television and literary properties. The most successful tend to have distinctive settings with large casts of characters, such as Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, but what about the more character-driven franchises, where the action tends to be led by a single hero through multiple adventures? There is always going to be a problem answering the question "who gets to play the hero?"

Age of Conan solves this problem by having players bid for the right to have Conan lead their armies, while the short lived Conan Collectible Card Game just lets every player have their own version of the Cimmerian hero when it's their turn, and Monolith's Conan adventure game balances Conan against a wide variety of arguably more interesting playable characters. Planet of the Apes divides lead character Taylor into four separate psychological aspects (with only limited success).

The designers of Samurai Jack: Back to the Past, based on the Cartoon Network animated television series, faced a similar design problem, and they found an ingenious solution. Players take on the roles of various colorful characters Jack meets along his journey, while Jack himself is a non-player character who adds an interesting layer of complexity to what would otherwise be a simple "race to the finish" game.

The game board consists of a trail of tiles representing different types of locations such as jungle, fields, or desert. Players play Movement cards to move along the trail, collecting Support cards along the way which will be spent at the end of the trail to fight one of several villains. The better your specific combination of Support cards, the more points you'll earn from the villain, so a lot of the game is looking at which cards are available at which locations, and planning your moves in order to beat your opponents to the cards you need for the most points when facing the villain.

This alone might be an okay game (if a little simple), but in addition to the player pieces, there are two non-player characters moving along the path, Samurai Jack and his nemesis Aku. Jack moves along the path first, his movement determined by drawing a random card. Then the players all move, and finally Aku moves using another random card. A separate board keeps track of Jack's sanity, and if he is on a tile by himself or with Aku, he moves a step closer to madness. If his madness tracker gets all the way to the end, all the players lose the game, so in addition to gathering the cards they need to win, players have to keep an eye on Jack, and occasionally come to his rescue.

The game manages to combine several different mechanical elements without any of them seeming out of place, and the graphic design and game components are miles ahead of what I would expect for a relatively inexpensive game like this: full color plastic miniatures, what looks like original illustrations rather than just screen captures from the show, and a sharp design sense overall. It all comes together to make a game that, while fairly simple, is entertaining to play and very true to its source material.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) a little on the simple side, but nevertheless an excellent, well-crafted game.

• Samurai Jack: Back to the Past official website
• Samurai Jack: Back to the Past on Board Game Geek

7 Ronin: why isn't this a game yet?

If you're a gamer and you've ever seen Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, you've probably watched the scenes where Kambei reviews his map of the village and crosses off the circles representing the enemy raiders and thought, "how is this not a board game?"

Well, you're not the only one. And fortunately, at least one game publisher thought the same thing, and the result is a small but still fairly epic game.

7 Ronin is a small 2-player game that attempts to capture the feel of Kurosawa's film. One player controls seven individual heroes with different abilities, who must defend the village from the other player's hoard of faceless bandits. Players plan their moves in secret, with the hero player trying to anticipate which approaches to the village the bandit player will attempt to use, while the bandit player tries to guess which areas will be left undefended.

The seven heroes have individual abilities which resolve depending on whether or not they end up with bandits in their space, and the bandits gain game abilities based on which areas they are able to occupy, either by fighting their way through the heroic ronin, or by attacking an undefended area. The number of areas the bandit player can attack increases each round, so that much like in the film, the heroes find themselves spread more and more thinly.

As the game progresses, both players find themselves needing to manage dwindling resources. The bandit player has to commit a minimum number of units to the battle, a number which increases each round. At the same time, the heroes take damage as they fight off the bandits, and eventually they will succumb to their injuries. Managing which heroes die, and when, is a major part of the hero player's strategy.

The only thing I really don't like about the game is how small it is. The main board is only 7 by 10 1/2 inches, the individual planning boards are half that size, and the playing pieces for both sides are tiny, especially the bandit tokens. I would love to create a large-scale version using 28mm miniatures, although painting 50 bandits might be a bit daunting.

With the bandit hoards making increasingly bold attacks against the dwindling group of heroes, the game really does capture a lot of the spirit of the film. The illustration and graphic design are serviceable, but they're a bit colorful and on the fantasy side of things, lacking the movie's somber contrast.

It's unfortunate that a license couldn't be secured to use the actual Seven Samurai characters and their images, but even without it, this game will call the film to mind.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) The tiny size of the board and pieces are the main thing keeping this game from a higher rating, but it's still a fun game.

• 7 Ronin official website
• 7 Ronin on BoardGameGeek

Reiner Knizia's Samurai: not conquering any new territory

Samurai is a pretty typical example of a Reiner Knizia game. The game play is abstract and deceptively simple, featuring a complex scoring system that is more than simply adding up points, and the theme is, for the most part, a tacked on afterthought. That said, the game still manages to be fairly engaging.

The game board, which scales based on the number of players, represents the islands of Japan. Cities and villages are marked out on the board, and at the start of the game their spaces are filled with tokens representing religion, commerce and military. Each player has a collection of tiles of varying values and symbols that correspond to the tokens on the board. Players take turns placing on the board, and as soon as a city or village is surrounded by tiles, the player whose surrounding tiles add up to the highest value claims the token or tokens that match their tiles' symbol. Some tiles have special abilities, such as allowing placement of an additional tile, or moving a tile that's already on the board.

As usual with a Reiner Knizia game, there is a little more to it than that. While the primary strategy lies in placing your tiles in such a way that you control when a village gets surrounded, you also need to think about which tokens you're claiming. The final scoring depends on how many of each type of token each player has collected, so you have to make decisions on which tokens you are trying to collect, based on what you have and what your opponents have taken.

The beautiful graphic design in the new edition published by Fantasy Flight Games helps to make up for the fairly inconsequential feudal Japan theme. In any case, there's enough going on to keep the game interesting, if similar to many of Knizia's other games such as Through the Desert and even Ingenious.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) A pretty good game when taken on its own merits, but it is very similar to a lot of other games from the same designer.

• Samurai official website
• Samurai on BoardGameGeek

Age of War: Risk Express by any other name

As I mentioned in my reviews for Seven Card Samurai and Shitenno, we're always on the lookout for a good samurai game, especially one that isn't a Risk clone as many games about feudal Japan tend to be. It may be a bit ironic, then, that I was drawn to Age of War, which started life as Risk Express, a Risk-themed dice game designed by Reiner Knizia and published by Parker Brothers in 2006.

Apparently, Risk Express didn't stay in print for very long, and for whatever reason, Fantasy Flight Games decided to give the game a samurai makeover, complete with new artwork for the proprietary dice and tiles that represent the different provinces of feudal Japan.

Each starts in the center of the table and is printed with one or more rows of symbols representing infantry, cavalry, archers, and generals, that must be rolled on the dice in order to conquer that province. The rows of symbols have to be matched one at a time, so it will take several rolls in order to conquer the province. If a roll fails to produce the symbols needed, the dice can be re-rolled, but each re-roll of a failed roll requires the player to remove one of the dice, until eventually the roll matches all the symbols needed and the province is taken, or the player runs out of dice.

In addition to conquering tiles from the center of the table, players can also attempt to take over their opponent's tiles, although it requires an extra "general" to be rolled. The tiles are matched by color in a group of four, two groups of three, three groups of two, and one single tile. If a player conquers all the tiles in a color group, they are worth more points and safe from attack, so an important element of the game is strategically choosing which tiles to go after, while keeping an eye on your opponents and preventing them from completing their sets.

If this sounds a little familiar, it's because it is very similar to Elder Sign, a Lovecraft-themed dice game also published by Fantasy Flight Games. Elder Sign adds a lot of elements to the game, giving it a more elaborate structure and adding cards that can be played to influence the dice rolls, but the core dice mechanic is the same.

I think that's all right though. Lovecraftian games need to be more complicated in order to fit the theme, and while I like Elder Sign, I also enjoyed the simplicity of Age of War.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Age of War is far too simple to be really compelling, but it's a nice simple game that can be played in a short amount of time, and the small box makes it a good travel game.

• Age of War official website
• Age of War on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: October 14, 2014

Shitenno: finally, a good samurai game

In my review of Seven Card Samurai I mentioned that we are fans of samurai films, an interest that has been rekindled thanks to a recent display of Japanese armor at the Portland Art Museum, and a friend's recent series of showings of the Lone Wolf and Cub movies on his impressive home theater system. We've been on the lookout for a good samurai themed game that isn't of the Risk-style army placement variety, which is a taller order than you might think.

We stumbled across a demo copy of Shitenno at our local game store, and gave it a try. After one play we were undecided, but we played it again a few weeks later and decided that we enjoyed it enough to pick up a copy for ourselves.

The game is a fight for control of feudal Japan, but rather than armies clashing, it is about clever use of resources to control strategic spaces on the board. The board is divided into eight provinces, each with four spaces for players to place their control tokens. Each player can place two tokens per turn, either by spending a specific combination of military or financial resources, with the spots costing more depending on how many control tokens are already there.

It is how players acquire their resources that is the more interesting part of the game. Each round, the player who was the first player on the previous turn assumes the role of Tairo and draws a certain number of military and koku (financial) cards, and also takes the four title cards, which determine turn order and also give a particular advantage for the next turn.

From these resources and titles, the Tairo forms a lot of as many or as few cards as he wishes, plus one title card, and offers it to the next player in the current turn order. That player can either take the lot or pass; if they pass, the next player can accept or pass, and so on until either the lot of cards has been taken or it comes back to the Tairo player, who must take it if no one else did.

Then the Tairo forms another lot of resources plus one title and offers it to the next player in line who doesn't have a lot yet, who can accept it or pass. This continues until everyone has some cards and a title for the next turn.

This is where much of the game's strategy takes place. Each province has a particular combination of different types of military cards that must be played in order to place a control token there, so the Tairo and the other players are looking at what's on offer, hoping to get the cards they need. The Tairo can't really make the lots too uneven or he'll get stuck with the worst of them, but he can try to fake out the other players by composing a lot with the cards he wants and a title he doesn't think the other players want. This can backfire, however, if he fails to correctly guess what the other players are after.

Play continues, alternating between placing control tokens and dividing up resources, until either any one player has run out of tokens or the koku deck has run out, at which point everyone gets to finish that turn and then points are added up based on how many control tokens each player has in each province, plus bonus points for koku cards still in hand as well as having the most tokens in a province.

Shitenno is pretty abstract, but at the same time I think it really conveys a sense of the political and economic wrangling that was common in feudal Japan, and it's helped along by some beautifully illustrated, high quality game components.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A conquest and control game that turns on resource management rather than combat, which sets it apart from similar area control games like Risk or Age of Conan.

• Shitenno official website
• Shitenno on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: July 27, 2014

Three card games that start with the letter S: Serpent Stones, Set, and Seven card Samurai

Serpent Stones is a card game, but it really has more in common with chess or Stratego: it is primarily a game about making strategic moves with pieces on a board in order to outmaneuver your opponent. The game is played on a staggered grid, and players must place their warrior cards one at a time to form an unbroken line from their side of the board to their opponent's, while at the same time protecting their own side of the board from their opponent's advances.

In addition to warrior cards which are played to the board, there are also strike cards which allow players to either destroy or capture adjacent opposing warriors. Destroyed warriors are removed from the board to clear a path for new cards to be played, and captured warriors are turned around so that they join the capturing player's line of warriors.

There are also tactical cards that can be played for various advantages such as drawing an extra card, forcing an opponent to discard, or setting a card aside to be played along with a second card on the next turn.

The Warrior cards are divided between eagles and jaguars, which has no bearing on the basic game but comes into play in two different advanced variants. In one, each player assumes control of either the House of Eagles or the House of Jaguars. Players can still play warriors from either house, but attack cards can only destroy warriors of the opposing house, and capture cards can only be played on warriors that match the player's house, regardless of who currently controls the card.

The other variant moves this idea to the individual warrior cards, so that while players aren't affiliated with a particular house, they can only play strikes on opposing adjacent warriors that are different from theirs, and only play strikes on opposing warriors that are the same. For example, if your eagle warrior is adjacent to my jaguar warrior, I can play a strike but not a capture, but if your jaguar is adjacent to my jaguar, I can play a capture card but not a strike.

The game's Aztec theme is interesting but largely decorative, and has no real bearing on game play. Normally I don't particularly like games that are this abstract, but Serpent Stones is pretty engaging, especially with the two different advanced variants to keep the game play from getting stale.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A solid two player game which is easy to pick up and play, but engaging enough to hold your interest.

• Serpent Stones official website
• Serpent Stones on BoardGameGeek.com

Set is unapologetically abstract. Billed as "the family game of visual perception," it has always seemed to me to have more in common with a perception or acuity test than a game. It consists of a deck of 81 cards printed with different abstract symbols that relate to one another in different ways. 12 cards are played out face up on the table, and the goal is to be the first player to spot a "set" of three cards.

A set is three cards whose symbols have exactly one element in common, and no more. As soon as a player spots a set they take the three cards, which are then replaced from the deck. If all players agree that no sets can be made from the cards on the table, three more are dealt. The game ends when either the deck runs out, or all the players agree that no more sets can be made from the available cards, at which point the player who claimed the most sets is the winner.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) There are no turns or strategy, it's just a contest to see who has the fastest pattern recognition, which to my mind means it's barely a game at all.

• Set official website
• Set on BoardGameGeek.com

We're both fans of Japanese samurai films (especially the ones by Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune), and at some point not too long ago, we realized that we didn't own any samurai-themed games. We weren't really interested in a huge, Risk-style area control game, which is what most games set in feudal Japan seem to be, and while I am intrigued by Samurai Sword (the samurai version of Bang!), we have enough trouble getting enough people together to play Bang!, so we didn't want another game with the same problem.

So we picked up Seven Card Samurai. The box had some nice graphic design to it, and described a game about using Samurai to defend rice supplies from bandits and ninjas. Unfortunately, what it contained was essentially a variation on rummy, with the same few pieces of unappealing artwork repeated in different colors across the cards.

Each player starts with a certain amount of rice bushels, represented by, admittedly, some very nice tokens. The idea is to play down samurai cards to defend your rice, while at the same time playing bandits to steal your opponent's rice. Additionally, you want to play your samurai in matching colors. The game ends when a player has seven samurai on the table, at which time each player is awarded points based on the number of samurai cards in each color set, as well as the amount of rice they've managed to hold on to or steal from the other players.

It's not a bad game per se (especially if you like rummy), but the artwork on the oversized cards is not very good, and the samurai theme is entirely irrelevant to the game play, as proven by the publisher's recent release of what appears to be the same game with a zombie theme.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) Not an awful game by any means, but there are much more interesting rummy variants out there, such as Mystery Rummy, and Shitenno and Tokaido are much better games about feudal Japan.

• Seven Card Samurai official website
• Seven Card Samurai on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: July 5, 2014