There’s a certain kind of chaos that only real-time games can create. It’s the moment when your brain suddenly forgets every skill you’ve ever worked on the moment the time pressure is on. I delight in this feeling, and this is exactly where Illiterati shines for me. Designed by Gary Alaka, Rob Chew, and Jon Kang, with art by Audrey Jung, and published by Gap Closer Games in 2023, Illiterati is a cooperative real-time word game for 1 to 5 players. Illiterati tasks players with frantically building words from a limited supply of letter tiles, all in an effort to craft the necessary words to defeat the evil secret organization that has taken over the world. Or something like that.
I have to commend Illiterati for its premise. It’s unique and interesting, if a bit nonsensical. The League of Librarians are trying to save the world’s books, one word at a time, and the Illiterati are determined to destroy it. The theme doesn’t really matter, but I appreciate the attempt to bring theme into what could otherwise be just a straightforward word game.
Each round, players are dealt a number of tiles each, as well as having some tiles in the centre of the table. Each player is dealt a card that they’re trying to achieve. Maybe one player needs to make one long word, of 8 characters or more and have 3 purple symbols in that word, while another player can have multiple words, but all of their words need to related to restaurants & fast food chains. And have 3 orange symbols to boot.
During the real time phase, players can freely swap tiles with each other and with the library, that communal pile in the centre of the table. But when the time runs out, all the words in front of everyone need to be valid words. They don’t necessarily need to fulfill each players card, but the do need to be words. And no, CXYSF is NOT a word.
Any unused tiles get pushed into the library, and if the library exceeds its limit (which scales based on the difficulty you choose at the start of the game), then no one can complete their card this round, and the timer that triggers the loss condition ticks closer to doomsday. But if the library is clear, then any players who achieved their card gets to discard all the words they used to complete their objective. Then the Illiterati attack. You flip over one card from the Illiterati deck, and just do what it says. Often it’ll discard some random tiles breaking the words you had made in the real time phase, but where Illiterati gets really tricky is the row of villain cards slowly fills up. If you ever flip over a card and the artwork matches one of the cards already in your row, you place it on top, and you preform the actions for the whole stack, starting from the top and moving down. Once you’ve resolved the attack, all players draw more tiles from the bag to add to the pile in front of them (leftovers from last round, likely words that have had key letters removed, thanks due to the Illiterati attack), and a new round begins.
The players keep playing rounds until either everyone is able to complete their personal objective card, then a second personal objective card, and lastly, everyone completes the same final, harder objective card to win. They lose if the library is full too many times and the doomsday tracker fills up.
Right out of the gate, I have to say that I appreciate that there’s only one way to lose. It feels like in most cooperative games there’s half a dozen ways to lose and only a single way to win. I understand why, it forces players to trade off short term risks with long term goals, but I found the focused goals in Illiterati refreshing. That’s not to say that Illiterati isn’t without trade-offs, it absolutely is. Like, do you strain your brain to try and make words matching this rounds theme, or should you just hold off another round in the hopes you’ll get the right tiles to make the word creation process easier. If you need 3 hearts in your word, and your only heart tiles are C, F, and X, maybe it’s worth waiting. But every round that goes by means another Illiterati attack, and once those start to stack, they can really wreck your words, sending you into a death spiral.
I couldn’t stop myself from comparing Illiterati to Bananagrams, another real-time word game. Though Illiterati strips away the crossword-style layout and focuses more on free-form word construction. Each player can have and hold between rounds up to eight words in front of them, but those words can be as long as you can manage, which led to some great moments where someone manages to assemble an absurdly long word out of a pile of mismatched tiles. There’s also quite a bit of joy in the moment when you draw new tiles, and you look at your beautiful words and need to pull them all apart to fit in the newcoming tiles.
The real-time aspect of the game does something to my brain. Once the timer is going, my stress spikes, and suddenly I’ve forgotten every word I’ve ever know. I’ll be looking at a F, L, U, F, F, and Y, and try to spell YLUFFF. But when you manage to break past that mental barrier, you can start to feel really clever. Especially those moments when you feel like you’re in a safe space early, because all your tiles are ordered neatly into words, and you can start peering across the table to help others with their tricky tiles. I found immense satisfaction in the process of looking over a pile of random letters, then slowly shaping them all into words.
Illiterati is a wonderfully produced game, the wooden tiles are a delight to hold and handle. They have a satisfying clink in the bag as you dive your hand in. The artwork on the Illiterati cards is vibrant and full of whimsical villainy. The box itself even looks like a book when you stack it on your shelf. I love everything about this production.
As a Co-op game, Illiterati does a pretty great job of balancing having people focus on their own task, while offering moments where you can collaborate and work together. From shifting the right symbols to each other, to offering to take someone’s stray K, it does often feel like you’re working as a team. I can’t really comment on the dreaded ‘alpha gamer’ problem, as that’s not a dynamic that exists at my tables, but I suspect the timer is the real track to resolving that, though. A quarterback can’t tell everyone what to do until their own board is satisfied.
All this being said, your enjoyment of Illiterati is going to hinge almost entirely on how you feel about word games in general. If the idea of staring at a pile of letters and trying to form words fills your heart with dread, or if games like Scrabble or Bananagrams stress you out, then Illiterati probably isn’t going to change your mind. The pressure of the timer only amplifies that feeling. But if you enjoy that kind of challenge, there’s a lot here to like.
There’s also a decent amount of replayability built into the system. The objective decks are thick, and you only use a couple cards each game. There are multiple difficulty levels to explore, and the shifting combination of constraints and Illiterati effects keeps the experience from feeling too repetitive. It’s not endlessly variable, but it’s more than enough to support repeated plays with different groups.
At the end of the day, Illiterati is a fun, smart, and slightly chaotic cooperative word game. It might feel a bit simple at times, closer to Bananagrams without the spatial crossword puzzle, but I found Illiterati to be a ton of fun and am happy to add it into my permanant collection.
Disclaimer: A copy of Viticulture: Bordeaux was provided by Stonemaier Games
I’ve always found Viticulture to be a bit of a fascinating contradiction. On one hand, it presents this warm, inviting fantasy of running a Tuscan vineyard, slowly cultivating grapes, building various structures to support your wine making enterprise, and hiring the right staff to help launch your vineyard to success. On the other hand, the much more real hand, it’s a ruthless efficiency race where you need to optimize every single action if you actually want to win. Viticulture has gone through many iterations at this point, from the Tuscany expansion that blew up the options for players to choose, to the Viticulture: Essential Edition which shrunk it back down, taking the best ideas from the original game and expansion, to the Tuscany: Essential Edition which took that shrunk down version and bloated it back up just a little bit, to Viticulture World, which offered a collaborative spin on the wine making formula. Having so many options and ways to play means that there’s probably a preferred vintage for every Viticulture player out there. So when the Bordeaux expansion was announced, and it was “just a board” expansion, I was skeptical. Is just a board enough to meaningfully change the experience when there’s already so much variety in the Viticulture extended universe?
Bordeaux‘s main gimmick is the introduction of experts. By going to the “Hire and Expert” action in spring, you can place one of your expert cubes onto any action that does not already have an expert cube on it. The expert will then give you a unique benefit when you go to that space for the rest of the game. Another fairly large change from previous boards is the “make one trade” action, which now has a Buy/Sell grid where each trade can only happen once per game. Beyond that, there’s obviously been some tweaking here and there, and if you aren’t familiar with the Tuscany side of Viticulture, the game now takes place over 4 seasons instead of just 2.
The first thing that really stood out to me is how much intention seems baked into the design. There’s a clear awareness of Viticulture’s long-standing criticisms, especially around card draw luck and early-game inertia. In previous games, it would take me 3 or 4 seasons to produce a single wine. Yes, you could just say “skill issue” and call it a day, but I know I wasn’t alone in feeling that starting a game of Viticulture can feel like a bit of a slog. Now, you start the game with 2 fields sold, a grape and a wine already produced, a bit of extra cash, and 1 residual income already on the board. All of these changes made the game feel more honed. We spent less time clearing the cruft off our farms and our strategies diversified from each other much faster than in previous games.
Another major complaint that Bordeaux directly addresses head-on is the card randomness. The grape vine cards and the wine order cards now have two face up at all time for players to pick from, along with just drawing off the top of the deck. This sounds like a small change on paper, but it’s such a breath of fresh air, being able to plan earlier in the season which wines to cultivate with the expectation of picking up the associated order in the fall. This change makes the planting grapes, to harvesting grapes into wines, to fulfilling orders pipeline feel so much more straightforward and reliable. No longer are you aging masses of red wines in your warehouse only to draw nothing but white and sparkling wine orders.
I didn’t find the expanded wake up chart nor the 4 season structure of this board to be radical changes to the game, but my preferred flavour of Viticulture has always been with the Tuscany: Essential Edition board, which already incorporated those changes. If you’re coming from base Viticulture or even Viticulture EE, having 4 seasons to contend with will feel like a dramatic shift. I do like the tweaked actions on this board. With 4 actions in each season and only starting with 3 or 4 workers, you really need to pick and choose which actions you want to complete each year. In past games there were actions that were seldom taken, but in Bordeaux, every action feels viable and worthwhile.
Having every action feel worthwhile feeds into the expert system I mentioned above. Throughout the game you can place your experts on actions to give yourself an extra benefit when you go to that location, but only one expert per location is allowed. This further forces players to diversify their strategies and it creates a compelling reason to come back and play more Bordeaux. The winner of one game didn’t even sell any wine, they managed to earn most of their points through buildings and managed to clear the score threshold before I was able to accelerate my wine order fulfillment to a point where I would eclipse him.
The expert bonuses are anything but subtle. They provide real, tangible benefits, sometimes taking a mediocre action into one you want to use every round. You do need to be careful though, as it costs an action to put an expert out in the first place. If you do that, make sure you then use the expert, otherwise you’re just wasting time, and that spells disaster in a race game like Viticulture.
In older versions of the game, there’s a certain predictability to how turns unfold. Seasoned players largely knew which spaces were going to be contested, and you would roughly how people will progress. But with this new board, that predictability starts to fade. One player forced themselves to the top of the turn order track to guarantee themselves an extra worker in the first winter, but when the strategies start to drift earlier in the game, you’ll find those old habits biting you in the back. The other players exhausted all their workers in the fall, leaving the player who denied themselves the better benefits lower on the turn order track all alone in winter anyway.
There are moments where it almost feels like Viticulture is bending over backwards to make sure you can do what you want, whether that’s through flexible trade options, more generous resource flows, or even action spaces that let you sidestep traditional restrictions entirely. Some theme has been lost in favour of more engaging and honed mechanics. Sure, you can plant that Cabernet Sauvignon without a irrigation tower. It’s a small criticism, and I know I’m more than happy to take a better gameplay experience at the expense of some theme, but for a game like Viticulture, which always felt a little more theme heavy than your average euro game, I can’t help but weep a little.
I walked away from Bordeaux feeling a bit like I did the first time I revisited Viticulture after a long break. I was reminded of why I loved the game in the first place, but also surprised by how differently it approached problems I’ve simply accepted as part of the experience for years. The faster start, reduced card frustration, and expert system all push the game in a more flexible direction, and while I do miss some of the tighter restrictions and thematic touches that defined earlier versions, I can’t deny how much fun I had exploring this new board.
I don’t think that Bordeaux is the definitive way to play Viticulture, nor will it be the board I pull out when introducing this game to new players. Tuscany still offers a more focused and demanding puzzle, and that’s usually the experience I’m craving when Viticulture hits the table. But Bordeaux has earned something that very few expansions manage after a decade of releases: it made me excited to play Viticulture again. Not because it replaced what came before, but because it showed me there were still new strategies, new stories, and new mistakes waiting to be discovered in a game I thought I already knew inside and out.
I have a complicated relationship with Alexander Pfister games. And by complicated relationship, I mean I actively dislike most of his designs. Great Western Trail, Blackout Hong Kong, and Maracaibo all illicit feelings of frustration and hatred from my heart when I sit down to play. That’s not to say I hate everything he touches, Broom Service and Isle of Skye are some of my favourite games of all time. But that dichotomy, the love it or hate it reaction I have to his games always makes me pause whenever I approach a new Pfister game. I won’t bury the lede here, Pirates of Maracaibo is pretty good.
The turn structure is very simple. On your turn, you just move your ship from the left side of the card display 1 to 3 cards to the up, down, and right, then doing the thing on the card you land on. That “thing” might be buying the card and bringing it into your tableau, offering you a persistent benefit or triggering one of the various actions of the game (exploring, raiding, or upgrading your ship usually, but I’ll expand on those later), or building a building. None of these actions are complicated on their own, and they all largely feel detached from one another, meaning that in your game you’ll need to choose which path you’ll want to focus on, being the jack of all trades and the master of none doesn’t often translate to very many end game points.
Regardless, your turn is simply move your boat, do the card thing, and that’s your turn. Once a player reaches the harbour on the far right side of the board, they trigger the end of the round for all players. The harbour has a (usually) stronger version of the actions that you can get from the cards for the player who landed there to take, then all other players take their last turn for the round. When it’s the player who reached the harbour’s turn, they move into Maracaibo, where they get 6 points and get to upgrade their ship. Then all ships are moved to the far left side of the card tableau, everyone gets their income, and the next round starts. After the 3rd round, the game ends and the player with the most points is the winner.
None of the little activities I just mentioned above are particularly thematic. The exploration action, for example, is just moving your meeple along a track and taking the benefit of whatever space you land on. Sure, you’ll cross rivers for end game points, and the rewards generally get better the further you move, but there’s no hidden depth in the exploration track. Similarly for raiding, you just roll 3 dice, then choose one to be your raid. The colour of the die you pick will affect which treasure you can claim (pearls, emeralds, or gold), but you just take the pip value of the die, add any bonus strength you may have, and then take various rewards based on your total raid value. Upgrading your ship is simply placing a single cube on the hull of your ship, covering up either a persistent benefit or a one time bonus. As you place more cubes on your ship, you’ll unlock better upgrade spots, but you’re always just placing a cube on a menu of benefits.
What I really like about Pirates of Maracaibo is how easy it is to play. Every action and benefit is uncomplicated. Even if the decisions you’re making have some weight, you can always see the consequences of your choices. Moving your ship might force you to make some trade-offs. If there’s a specific card you want, or you placed your black market tile somewhere a little inconvenient, you might need to decide exactly where to park your ship for a round so you can reach your preferred destination next round. But very rarely will you ever do something and say “Oh, I didn’t realize that was going to happen.”
The cards that make up the main space of the game offer a fair amount of benefits too. In addition to the action or persist benefit they offer, each card also is worth some end game points, and many will give you money or points income between each round, making every movement the result of several micro-decisions.
Adding to your decision space are the quest cards. Each player starts the game with one, but you can earn several more as the game progresses. The quest card will nudge you towards specializing in a specific way, and hopefully you can acquire a couple that synergize well together to really rake in those end game points. The quest cards are semi-random, perhaps the specific one you were hoping for doesn’t show up, but at least there is a quest card market, letting you pick from two face up quests, or drawing one from the top of the deck. You even have the option of wiping the card market before choosing to take one or drawing from the top of the deck. I appreciate the options instead of being subjected to total randomness.
What I really love about Pirates of Maracaibo are when you can hit a good combo on a turn. You move your ship, spend some money, get an effect that lets you move your explorer, which gives you more money funding your next turn. The cascading, barely in your control efficiency is really satisfying when it manages to come together. Starting a round with only 4 coins and being able to make it all the way to Maracaibo without needing to spend a whole turn taking income makes me feel really clever and smart. Unlike a lot of Alexander Pfister games that make me feel handcuffed, where I often feel like I’m staring at a bunch of things I *could* do, if only I had the exact three prerequisites lined up perfectly, Pirates of Maracaibo is much more forgiving. If I do run out of money I can just spend a turn putting my ship into a better position, and take 5 coins. It’s refreshing.
One thing that caught me off-guard was just how much of the game’s scoring lives at the end. During play, your points can feel modest. I think in my best game I managed to hit 60 points before the final scoring. Then the final scoring happens, and suddenly I’m sitting at 200 after everything tallies up. So if you’re mid-game and feeling behind because someone has 40 points, and you’re stuck at 20, it’s honestly not worth worrying about. Once you internalize how big that final scoring swing is, the whole experience relaxes. I don’t get that creeping sense of doom when I’m behind; I just keep playing and see how it all shakes out. And more often than not, it shakes out better than I expected.
Interaction is… there, but only just. You can land your ship on a card that has another players ship, and you’ll need to pay them a dollar for the privilege. On the exploration track, you can’t share spaces, but hopping over someone is free, so it’s actually more of a speed boost than a blockade. You can technically drain islands of their treasure, but that would just leave you holding less valuable loot yourself, so it’s not exactly a cutthroat strategy. There’s a small bonus for being the first to build certain buildings, but beyond that, everyone’s mostly doing their own thing. I think the most interactive element here is when someone rushes to Maracaibo and brings the round to an end while everyone else is playing around the middle islands.
And honestly, that’s fine. This isn’t the kind of game I come to for tense player interaction. Instead, it excels at being a good euro game, one where I feel clever in my efficiencies. If I win, it’s because I built the best point scoring engine, not because I managed to beat my opponents down more than others.
So where does that leave Pirates of Maracaibo for me? I’m happy to report that it totally subverted my expectations. It’s one of the few Alexander Pfister euro games I actively want to keep playing. Unlike Maracaibo, Great Western Trail, or Blackout: Hong Kong, Pirates of Maracaibo never makes me feel trapped beneath its own complexity. Instead, it feels loose, approachable, and surprisingly forgiving.
I think that’s why Pirates of Maracaibo works for me when so many of Pfister’s heavier games don’t. It doesn’t constantly punish me for not planning six turns ahead, nor does it make me feel like I’ve accidentally ruined my game because I missed one prerequisite thirty minutes ago. It just lets me play. Move the ship, take a card, build a little engine, chase a few quests, and hopefully stumble into a satisfying combo or two along the way. And when those combos hit, when all the tiny efficiencies start cascading into one another, the game feels fantastic.
Is it the most thematic pirate game? Not even close. Is it particularly interactive? Also, no. But as a breezy midweight euro where I can quietly optimize my little East India Trading company while feeling clever the entire time, it absolutely succeeds. More importantly, it succeeds at making me enjoy an Alexander Pfister design, which for me, was the biggest surprise of all.
Sometimes, I come into a game with no expectations at all, and then am pleasantly surprised when the game turns out to be amazing. Take Time, Scout, and No Thanks are all examples of games that I knew almost nothing about before playing utterly falling in love. The flip side of that scenario is when you keep seeing pictures of a game all over social media, you stalk the game’s BGG page, you voraciously consume every review and commentary about the game because it looks like so much fun, but then when you actually get to play it, it just falls flat. And unfortunately, Kabuto Sumo falls into the latter family for me.
Kabuto Sumo, designed by Tony Miller, with art by Kwanchai Moriya and published by AllPlay in 2021, is a coin-pushing dexterity game about sumo wrestling bugs trying to jostle each other off a tree stump. These beetles, all themed after famous WWE characters, evoke a ton of charm. Much of that charm is conveyed by the brilliant and evocative artwork of Kwanchai Moria, whose work coveys a sense of drama and excitement. The small helmet beetle facing down Mighty Jaw Mike, the terrifying Giant Stag Beetle makes for great piece of artwork.
The production of Kabuto Sumo is no slouch either. All the discs are large and smooth and feel nice to hold. Each of the unique characters have unique shaped pieces that will give them an edge in combat. But what is combat, in the context of Kabuto Sumo? Heavily inspired by coin pusher machines, each player will take turns moving the on-ramp to the tree trunk, and then in one steady motion, push their disc onto the tree trunk, displacing the existing discs on the board, and hopefully, pushing the opposing beetle off as well. If you can’t knock your opponent off the platform, an alternate victory condition is wrestling them into submission, by exhausting their supply of pieces.
What makes this most interesting is that the discs on the trunk aren’t square, nor are they a single size. Instead, they’re all perfectly rounded and come in 3 different sizes. Sometimes you’ll line up a push, only for a big disc 3 away from your push to slip in the wrong direction, shifting the entire play area into a state you didn’t quite expect. Now, I’m no physics major, but it is a lot more enjoyable having to deal with the chaos of round discs pushing against each other rather than boring, predictable squares.
Another layer to this combat is each character having their own unique power and pieces. One wields a large horn that can catch a whole big disc in it’s gaping maw. Another has 5 V shaped antenna that you stack together and push onto the play area in one fell swoop. These powers do cost you some of your inventory, however, so you often really want to hold it back until a truly optimal moment, lest you be left up the creek without a paddle.
I want to celebrate Kabuto Sumo. It’s unique, it looks great, I love the production, and I was obsessed with it before I got my hands on it. Now, I only have a passing familiarity with WWE characters, and I’ve never really spent time with a real coin pusher machine, but I love how unique this game is. Unfortunately for me, the gameplay failed to hook or engage not only myself, but everyone I played it with. Most of my plays happened at the 2 player count, and most of our duels devolved into a tit-for-tat defensive pushing affair. I’d move their beetle closer to the edge, they’d move it right back. More often than not it became a battle of attrition, with each player just trying to avoid a victory by submission than anything else.
Kabuto Sumo is the kind of game that charms on first contact, and a lot of that charm comes from the production. But repeat plays failed to engage or excite. Once we experienced the novelty of pushing discs off the tree trunk, doing it a second or third time felt stale, even when using different characters with different powers. Maybe my problem was always playing with adults. Lacking the whimsy and excitement of adolescence makes Kabuto Sumo hit softer than it otherwise might within the right context. It also doesn’t help that I was the most familiar with the references that all the bugs were making, and I am barely wrestling literate at that.
In the end, Kabuto Sumo leaves me with a strange feeling. Caught somewhere between admiration and indifference. I can clearly see the version of this game that absolutely sings: a table full of laughter, kids leaning in too far, someone celebrating a perfectly timed push like they’ve just won a championship belt. The design is clever, the table presence is undeniable, and the tactile joy of it all should be enough. But for me, right now, it isn’t.
What I’m left with is a game I want to love more than I actually do. A beautiful object that promises chaotic tactile delight that never actually materialized in my plays. The moments of excitement are there, when you manage to pull off a 4 disc chain and push a large piece off the other end of the tree trunk. But those moments are often separated by long stretches that feel oddly static for a dexterity game.
And yet, I’m not ready to write Kabuto Sumo off completely. Instead, I feel like I’m waiting for the right audience. I suspect the context in which Kabuto Sumo shines isn’t with a bunch of stuffy boring adults who are working out optimal defences and playing the game safely. It thrives with someone too inexperienced with life to know to play it safe. Someone who puts themselves in danger, because even though they might lose, they might do something cool in the meantime. And that moment is more valuable than victory.
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.
