I’m a pretty antisocial kind of guy, which is not exactly conducive to building a community. I’m the perpetual lurker: always reading, always watching, rarely commenting. I show up to public events and hover near the wall, sticking close to the people I already know, not really engaging in the way I’d perhaps like to. But when I saw that a local board game café was hosting a launch party for a local designer’s newly published game, I decided it was my civic duty to show up and support a local success story. After all, if I ever designed and published a board game, I’d hope my local community would come out to support it. The launch party even just so happened to fall on my regularly scheduled board game night, so I convinced my friends to make the trip out to the café, and we sat down with Tatsumi, designed by Jeremy Rozenhart and published by Adam’s Apple Games in 2026.

In Tatsumi, each player is a Tatsu, a guardian dragon, trying to collect elemental rings from a 5 by 5 grid of ocean wells, and offer them to shrines in order to cover their island and score the most points. The turn structure is wonderfully simple. Every turn you’ll do two things, and one of those things must be movement. To move, you simply fly in one direction as far as you want. Dragons block each other, so you can’t simply hop over someone or push them out of the way to land on their space, but otherwise movement feels very open and free. Whenever you leave a space, you collect the ring from the well you were standing on and add it to your holding area. Your second action is either gathering or offering. Gathering lets you collect additional rings from the spaces near your dragon, and in the asymmetric version of the game every dragon gathers differently. Offering on the other hand lets you cash in the rings you’ve collected at altars around the edges of the board, which will see you placing rings onto your personal island and scoring points based on the number of elemental rifts you’ve managed to cover.

I really appreciate is how clean and flexible the whole game feels. Each turn you must move, then do one of the other two actions, but you can do them in any order. You can choose to gather and then move, setting yourself up for an offer next round, or offer and then move or move and offer, you get the picture. Tatsumi gives you just enough freedom that every turn feels like you’re trying to untangle a logistical knot in the most efficient way possible. The altars themselves are also a neat little pressure point. On one side they ask for three rings of the same colour and reward you by letting you place one of your scales onto the associated blessing tile that might give you a persistent ability, a burst of points, or some other perk. Then the altar flips over and suddenly wants a totally different set of coloured rings, with no blessing perk for that offering. It creates this nice tempo where you’re constantly weighing whether now is the right time to cash in or if you can afford to wait one more turn before the other players change the altars requirements out from under you.

The scoring system also pulls you in different directions simultaneously. Your first ring needs to be placed along the edge of the board, and every subsequent ring must be placed adjacent to an existing ring. Every ring you place scores you points equal to the number of elemental rifts that you’ve managed to cover. But those rifts are scattered along the edges of your board, making you really reach to cover all of them to start raking in 4 points per ring of that colour placed. This mechanism gives Tatsumi a really great sense of progression, with the points you’re netting at the end of the game absolutely dwarfing the points you were earning at the start.

Adding to the spatial puzzle of Tatsumi, the coloured rings have their own endgame scorings. Your largest contiguous section of blue rings will net you two points per ring in that group. The yellows are kind of the opposite, where each group of yellow rings nets you 2 points, no matter their size. The blacks want to be adjacent to all the colours, as each black ring scores one point for every different colour next to them, and the red rings just want to be together, scoring 5 points for each group of 3 rings or more. These requirements will have you weighing your short term benefits of covering things on your island for potentially more points down the road, with ruining some of your carefully laid end game scoring plans. The way Tatsumi pulls your brain in two is simply delightful.

I’ve always adored tactical puzzle games. If you’ve been around my blog for a while, I’ve already covered games like Azul, Sagrada, Harmonies, Cascadia, Calico, or Akropolis. And Tatsumi stands alongside this incredible line up. It’s easy to teach, easy to understand, but capable of producing that really satisfying brain burn of “okay but if I move here first, or maybe I should do this instead…” that makes tactical puzzle games so gratifying to play. It’s the kind of game where you don’t have to take it seriously, and you’ll have a pleasant time, but if you’re trying to optimize every point, it really starts to be taxing on the brain in a really great way.

I also really need to talk about the production because it’s genuinely novel. The dragons sit on these ocean wells: a plastic tray holding stacks of rings in a five-by-five grid. As you move around the board you’re hoovering up rings from the wells, and once a well runs dry, you drop in a little sand dollar token to mark it empty. You can still land there, you just won’t collect anything when you leave. The tray itself is kind of genius. I can only imagine how fiddly this game would have been if you had to constantly refill spaces from a bag or manually build stacks during setup. Instead, at the end of the game you basically set the plastic tray in the bottom of the box and just chuck all the rings into the tray, and they just naturally settle into place. It’s one of those production decisions that solves a problem you didn’t even realize would have annoyed you.

The rings themselves are also delightfully tactile. Gathering them feels good in a very simple, toy-like way. You just dip the tip of your fingers into the wells and pull it out effortlessly. This is like the opposite of when you’re trying to pick up a card, but you can’t get your fingernail between the card and the table. There’s also something deeply reminiscent about moving rings from the board into your holding area and then onto your island adjacent to already placed rings. That aspect actually reminds me of The Castles of Burgundy, actually.

I do have some gripes, of course. Sometimes it was difficult to see what the altar on the opposite side of the table required because the ocean board itself obscured the view a little. Black rings sitting alone in wells could also awkward to spot depending on the lighting and your angle at the table, making you think a well was empty while planning your turn. I didn’t feel like the rulebook was especially laid out well, either, which made it harder than it should have been to find some edge-case clarifications during play. Thankfully for us, the designer was right there for us to ask him questions. One specific example of the rulebook failing involved the blessing cards. The phrase in the book said to shuffle them all together, but the intent was that one blessing of each of the 4 types would be used in each game. None of these complaints were game-breaking problems by any means, but they were the sort of little friction points that stood out, because the rest of the experience was so smooth.

Still, Tatsumi made an immediate positive impression on me. The asymmetry from the dragons, islands, and blessings adds enough variety to make repeat plays interesting without overcomplicating the core puzzle, and the game is just genuinely satisfying to interact with from moment to moment. We were hooked almost immediately.

Honestly though, I think the best endorsement of Tatsumi happened after the games were over. As tables started finishing up at the café, people immediately began crowding around the designer asking if they could buy one of his copies right there on the spot. Not preorder it. Not wishlist it. Buy it to take it home right then and there.

And really, I think that speaks more praise than any review can.