Those are the first voice-acted words spoken in the Final Fantasy franchise. They’re spoken by Tidus as Final Fantasy X begins in medias res. A group of people sit around a campfire looking forlorn and melancholy. There’s no context for who these people are or where they are, or what’s causing them to be so depressed. All we have is this beautiful piano piece playing over the scene as a blonde boy touches a girl’s shoulder and then walks up a hill to look at a ruined city in the distance. He asks us to listen to his story.
Before I dive any further in, I want to mention up front that Final Fantasy X is one of the few Final Fantasy games I had actually played a lot of before starting this blog series. I played the original PS2 release back in 2005 when I was about 14 or 15 years old. I vaguely remembered something, like running into a stone wall of a fight when Kimahri has his solo battle, and some another boss or two being incredible difficulty spikes. I remembered the major plot twists, and getting up to what I thought was the final boss. That said, something I’ve learned over the course of this series is that if you don’t play a game for twenty years, you really don’t remember very much of it when you come back.
Story
Final Fantasy X begins in earnest with Tidus about to head to a Blitzball game, a type of underwater soccer. He’s a star player of the Zanarkand Abes and treated exactly like you’d expect a professional sports celebrity to be treated. He’s cocky, full of himself, loud, kind of obnoxious. Just a downright jock in every sense of the word. But as the Blitzball game gets underway, an unknown monstrosity attacks the city of Zanarkand. Buildings crumble around him and, in the chaos, Auron appears. Auron was a friend of Tidus’s father, Jecht. Jecht disappeared at sea ten years ago and Auron has seemingly been watching out for Tidus ever since. He tosses Tidus a sword and asks if he knows how to use it. Before long, though, both Auron and Tidus are sucked up into the sky by this gigantic gaping maw.
Tidus then awakens in an unknown ruined location where he’s picked up by a ship with some Al Bhed peoples, who speak a language he doesn’t understand. Thankfully, one of the Al Bhed, Rikku, does speak his language and she recruits him to help recover some underwater treasure. Things go slightly awry, as that giant monstrosity appears again. The Al Bhed call it Cin, and the next thing you know, Tidus is once again waking up in the water. This time, however, he washes ashore on the island of Besaid, an idyllic tropical beach that feels almost aggressively peaceful after the destruction of Zanarkand.
In Besaid, he meets Wakka, captain of the local Blitzball team. Tidus can’t help but show off his Blitzball skills, Wakka. He asks who Tidus plays for, and Tidus proudly proclaims that he’s the star player of the Zanarkand Abes. The whole group is in a quiet shock. Wakka says Zanarkand was destroyed 1,000 years ago and its ruins are considered sacred ground. They chalk Tidus failed memory and general cluelessness to the customs of the world to Sin’s toxin messing with his head.
Wakka brings him back to the village where Tidus meets Yuna, who is about to embark on her pilgrimage. Yuna is a summoner, and the role of a summoner is twofold. Their first duty is to go on a pilgrimage across the world, praying at temples along the way until they reach Zanarkand where they obtain the Final Aeon and use it to destroy Sin, bringing about a temporary Calm to the world. But Sin always returns. The cycle continues endlessly until humanity has supposedly atoned for its past sins.
The monster Sin that destroyed Tidus’s Zarnakand in the introductory sequence is this cataclysmic force that appears seemingly at random to destroy towns whenever humanity becomes too technologically advanced. The local religion, Yevon, teaches that Sin appeared because Zanarkand relied too heavily on machina and that Sin is humanity’s punishment for becoming lazy and dependent on technology.
The second duty of a summoner is to perform sendings, guiding the souls of the recently departed to the Farplane, so they can rest peacefully. Otherwise those souls linger, consumed by resentment, eventually becoming the fiends you fight throughout the game. I actually really appreciated this because it’s a great bit of ludo-narrative cohesion. The monsters aren’t just there because it’s a JRPG and JRPGs need monsters. The game gives them an actual place in the world and mythology. These souls are often represented by pyreflies, floating streaks of light drifting through the air, and you see them constantly throughout Spira.
Yuna convinces her party to let Tidus join them as one of her guardians. Wakka is already traveling with her, and you’re introduced to Lulu, the black mage, and Kimahri Ronso, this giant muscular blue lion-man with a broken horn who sort of exists somewhere between a dragoon and a blue mage. The party sets off from Besaid, and thus begins Final Fantasy X.
What immediately sets Final Fantasy X apart from every previous Final Fantasy is that there’s no over world to explore. Instead, you are on a pilgrimage, traveling from one location to another down a series of narrow hallways. Seriously, Final Fantasy X is basically a straight line that you move along as the story progresses. Sure, there are often small diversions or forks in the road. But at the end of those diversions is generally a single treasure chest, then you just need to head back to your main road and keep following the carefully designed path.
On one hand, I genuinely appreciated this change. No longer are you aimlessly hoofing it across barren over world landscapes trying to find the next destination while random encounters chew through your patience. In past games these over worlds gave you a sense of freedom, of having an open world. But you aren’t really free in those games, there’s a specific place you need to be to progress the story. Having the open world gives you the illusion of freedom. And in many of the past games if you accidentally venture in the wrong direction, you’ll encounter enemies 30 levels higher than you are and get instantly KO’ed. I know Final Fantasy XIII was heavily criticized for being a series of hallways, but part of me has to wonder why XIII got all those criticisms and yet X seems to have dodged the hallway simulator moniker. Maybe it’ll make sense when I get to XIII.
Most of the world is rendered fully in 3D unlike the previous games which used 3D character models on pre-rendered backgrounds. Because the locations in Final Fantasy X are mostly narrow hallways with fixed camera angles, the camera can pan and zoom and frame scenes in ways earlier games really couldn’t. In Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Final Fantasy IX, the camera mostly just slid around on the X and Y axis. Here, the camera moves dynamically through forests, villages, and temples, creating this sense that the world is dense and alive beyond the path you’re walking. I wonder if the reason Final Fantasy X avoided the “hallway” criticism I mentioned, is because hallways evoke the feeling of being overly simplistic. These hallways are acceptable to me because the world feels textured and full in a way the older overworlds often didn’t.
The use of linear pathways does something that I really appreciate. It controls the pacing of the story. You don’t miss important details because you didn’t visit an optional location, you don’t spend days wandering between plot points. The story is delivered smoothly and cohesively.
Using Tidus as the protagonist in this story also works incredibly well because he’s effectively a stranger in a strange land. Since he doesn’t understand Spira, the game has a perfectly natural excuse to dump exposition to him, and by extension, to the player. Tidus doesn’t understand Yevon’s teachings because we don’t understand them either. Meanwhile, for the people of Spira, these rituals are just part of life. They’ve never known anything different.
So as Yuna’s pilgrimage begins, Tidus is this happy-go-lucky idiot. He makes all these promises that he and Yuna will come back to these locations later. He completely misses the awkward and sad looks people give when he says these things. Then, partway through the journey, Tidus learns the truth: summoning the Final Aeon to defeat Sin kills the summoner. Yuna’s pilgrimage is her offering herself as a sacrifice, so the people of Spira can experience a brief period of peace, called the Calm.
Everyone else already knew this. They understood from the very start that this journey ends with Yuna’s death one way or another. Tidus, meanwhile, absolutely refuses to accept it. He vows to think of something, like the irrational child he kind of is. Which to be fair, defeating Sin doesn’t mean Sin is gone forever. Quite the opposite, the Calm generally lasts for about 10 years, then Sin always returns. The teachings of Yevon say that when the people have atoned enough, then the cycle will break. So they just keep throwing Summoners at the problem, hoping that each new Calm will be the eternal one.
Tidus also finds himself directly at the center of this conflict when Auron reveals that Sin is actually Jecht. Auron brought Tidus here at Jecht’s request in the hope that Tidus might finally break this endless cycle. Tidus hates Jecht. Jecht was the Wayne Gretzky of Blitzball players, so even though Tidus is a star athlete in his own right, professionally he’s still living in his fathers shadow. When Jecht was at home, his mother ignored him, fawning over Jecht. When Jecht tried to be a parent, he would berate Tidus, calling him a crybaby and that the only thing he was good at was crying. Anytime Jecht’s name comes up, Tidus is quick to point out his resentment towards Jecht.
I actually really love the father-son relationship here. I grew up with a single mother and never knew my father, and one thing that always frustrated me throughout the 90s and 2000s was how media constantly depicted fatherless sons as being overwhelmed with joy the moment their deadbeat father returned. It’s never something I connected with because I don’t have those feelings. If my father appeared in my life tomorrow, I wouldn’t suddenly want a relationship with him. To me, family is so much more than blood, it’s the relationships between people.
So I appreciate that Tidus is angry. Jecht was a jerk to him as a child and then disappeared. Tidus doesn’t spend the game longing for reconciliation. He has this massive chip on his shoulder because he spent his entire life living in the shadow of his famous father. And then in a twist of cruel irony, throughout Spira, he learns that Jecht traveled alongside Yuna’s father, High Summoner Braska, and because Braska brought the last Calm, he, Jecht, and Auron are viewed as legendary heroes. It’s genuinely compelling watching Tidus try to reconcile these conflicting feelings about a man he hates and hearing from everyone how much of a hero he was.
Graphically, Final Fantasy X looks significantly better than Final Fantasy IX. Almost like there was a generational leap or something. Like the previous games, it uses both low-resolution and high-resolution character models depending on the scene. Most gameplay uses lower-detail models, while emotional cutscenes swap in the more detailed versions. Sometimes it’s kind of jarring. You’ll have Wakka’s high-detail face standing beside some poor NPC who looks like they were carved out of damp cardboard.
The character movement can also be hilariously stiff at times. There are scenes where characters pivot like forklifts before walking off in a different direction. While very often the aesthetic, music, and well realized world can look great, there are absolutely moments where you’re suddenly reminded that Final Fantasy X is over twenty years old.
But then the FMV cutscenes kick in and good lord. These cutscenes are what I remembered the game looking like back in 2005. The flowing water, the hair physics, the lighting, it’s all incredibly good looking. Squaresoft absolutely flexed everything they learned from the previous Final Fantasy games and from their failed movie venture Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. One thing I especially appreciated was how seamlessly the game transitions between in-engine scenes and FMV scenes. Sometimes the transition between FMV and in-engine is clunky, sometimes it’s smooth, but it always looks good.
As the story progresses, the party begins to reject the idea of feeding summoners into this endless cycle of death. They repeatedly clash with Seymour Guado, a high priest of Yevon who believes the only release from suffering, is death itself. Seymour wants to actually become Sin because he genuinely thinks annihilating humanity is its ultimate salvation.
The party, unsurprisingly, rejects his philosophy.
Another aspect to the world is you discover that some people can remain in Spira after death as “unsent,” essentially refusing to pass on. Eventually, near the end of Yuna’s pilgrimage, the party meets Yunalesca, the original summoner who defeated Sin a thousand years ago. They learn the full horrifying truth: not only does summoning the Final Aeon kill the summoner, but the Final Aeon itself must be created from one of the summoner’s guardians. Braska chose Jecht. The Final Aeon destroys Sin… and then becomes the next Sin.
The party refuses to continue the cycle and defeats Yunalesca, effectively destroying humanity’s only known method of combating Sin. I actually chuckled at the scene afterward where the group casually informs Maester Mika that they killed Yunalesca, and the poor man just completely breaks down, refusing to believe that there is any alternative to the current cycle. Instead of listening to the party or trying to help, he just gives up and sends himself to the Farplane, dissolving into pyreflies.
During all this, Tidus also learns the truth about his own existence. A thousand years ago, Zanarkand and Bevelle were at war. Zanarkand’s summoners knew they were doomed against Bevelle’s machina, so the leader of Zanarkand, Yu Yevon used the fayth, people locked in an eternal slumber, with their dreams getting physical manifestations. That’s what Yuna’s aeons are, dreams from the Fayth at each temple. Yu Yevon uses the Fayth to summon Dream Zanarkand, and hides it elsewhere in the world before Yu Yevon created Sin. Tidus is from Dream Zanarkand, and is therefore a dream of the fayth himself. All this means that when Sin and Yu Yevon die, the fayth will stop dreaming, and Tidus will disappear.
This is the most confusing part of the plot, and I’ll be honest in saying that I looked it up after the fact. But I do want to mention here that Final Fantasy X has the most approachable story of the series by far. There’s no alien cells being injected into people, no memory loss mixed with time travel, nothing that convoluted. The world has all kinds of texture and depth, the religion feels real and well thought out, but the overall story, Yuna’s pilgimage, is really straightforward. This is one of the first times I’ve been able to follow the entirety of the story without much confusion or needing to look up alternative resources to figure out exactly what’s going on.
The party eventually teams up with Cid and his airship, tears a hole into Sin. They journey inside Sin’s body Pinocchio-style to confront Jecht and Yu Yevon himself. Tidus’s reunion with Jecht is exactly the kind of messy emotional confrontation I wanted from the game. Tidus says he hates him. Jecht basically responds with “Yeah, I know.” There’s no magical reconciliation. No perfect healing. Just two deeply flawed people understanding each other a little too late.
And then Tidus says, “This is the only time I’m glad that you’re my dad,” right before they have to kill him. Perfect.
After defeating Jecht, the party confronts Yu Yevon in a final battle that’s kind of fascinating mechanically. Every time you hit him, he heals for 9,999 damage, so unless you’re breaking the damage cap, the fight becomes this long grind. At the same time, all your party members have Auto-Life, so no matter what Yu Yevon does, you just keep getting back up. I suppose there’s something thematically fitting about that. The battle feels less like overcoming a challenge and more like stubbornly outlasting the embodiment of an endless cycle. Apparently Yu Yevon will use Grativja and hit the whole party and itself at the same time, constantly knocking it’s health down, but I managed to overcome it by breaking it’s magic, and then casting reflect on it so it’s healing just reflected to my party instead.
Anyway, once Yu Yevon is defeated and Sin explodes into a mountain of pyreflies, Tidus begins to fade away. There’s this genuinely emotional farewell where Yuna runs to hug him and falls straight through his disappearing body. He stands behind her, wraps her arms around her for a tender moment, then leaps off the ship with a hasty ‘goodbye’.
Because the church of Yevon sits at the center of the story, the gradual dismantling of that institution gives Final Fantasy X an incredible sense of scale. Whether it’s the party being branded heretics or watching Wakka, who starts the game as a blind follower of Yevon, to the point of racism and bigotry, slowly confront and unpack the hypocrisy around him, it feels huge. When the game reaches its climax and you finally tear down the foundations of this entire religion, it genuinely feels like you’re killing God. Final Fantasy has always loved the “fight God at the end” thing, but I think Final Fantasy X executes that idea better than any game in the series so far by having the entire conflict and story and culture of the world being centered around the church of Yevon.
The Level System
For this playthrough, I played the original US PS2 release, meaning I didn’t get access to the Expert Sphere Grid, but I’ll touch on that in second. The Sphere Grid itself is this massive interconnected web of nodes where every character starts in a different location. Instead of traditional leveling, gaining experience and passively improving their stats with each level up, characters gain Sphere Levels which let them move within the grid following the lines and activating nodes to increase stats or learn abilities.
I actually really enjoyed this system. It feels highly customizable even if, in practice, the customization is a little illusory because most characters are clearly funneled along intended paths. Tidus moves toward agility and time magic like Haste and Slow. Lulu focuses on elemental black magic. Auron becomes a physical powerhouse. But because everyone exists on the same grid, you can absolutely do ridiculous things if you want. You can focus your time and efforts to turn everyone into black mages if that’s your dream.
Often characters will come across a branching path on the sphere grid. Perhaps it’s a dead end, but has access to a couple extra nodes for a stat boost, or a path will be blocked off by a lock. Often removing these locks are what give characters the ability to trespass on other characters routes, letting you double up on skills amongst your party members. That being said, most of the time I just followed characters along their intended routes. The one exception was Kimahri, who I pushed toward Lulu’s section of the board to turn him into a backup black mage so I could exploit elemental weaknesses more aggressively.
By the end of the game, each character was around the end of their sphere grid, or was just starting to overlap with others. Wakka got Auron’s Break skills, Auron was moving into Tidus’s path to get more speed, that kind of thing. I’ve read that some people put the time in to earn ludicrous amounts of sphere levels to then max out each character on the sphere grid, but that’s an insane task that’s wholly unnecessary to beat the game. I’ve also read that doing that largely robs each character of what makes them unique.
The Battle System
The Sphere Grid gives you stats and abilities, so it ties directly into the battle system, and I think Final Fantasy X has one of the better combat systems in the series so far. Gone is the ATB system that’s been present since Final Fantasy IV Now, battles are fully turn-based with visible turn order. Big attacks will cost more ‘time’, while quick attacks or using items might let you do 2 actions before the next enemy gets to make their move. Adding to this, you can (and are encouraged to) swap party members in and out mid-battle without forfeiting that characters turn. I can’t stress how much I like this flexibility. Now I’m no longer trying to think if I should have my black mage in the party, or leave them behind for a summoner like I was in Final Fantasy IX or VI. Everyone is available at all times, but only 3 characters are in a battle at any one moment. Sometimes it was a juggle trying to get the right 2 characters out at the same time so one could buff the other, but it was a tactical consideration I really enjoyed.
An important aspect of this battle system is that any character who participates in the battle gets the full SP rewards. The SP earned from a fight is not divided between all characters, everyone gets the full amount from the fight. What this means in practice is that you really want every character to take at least one action in every fight. Once you get into the rhythm of it, it becomes second nature. Using your first two turns to kill all but one monster, then swap in every other party member to do a non-damage skill before finishing off the last one. I’m also pretty sure this mechanic is why teenage me struggled so much with the game back in 2005. Especially because some story sections lock your party composition, and if you’ve neglected certain characters, suddenly you’re in trouble. I neglected Kimahri hard, so when he had a solo battle he had to tackle, it was essentially a brick wall for me. Thankfully older me is more wise and now that I understood the system from the beginning, I was much more prepared to deal with that twist.
A lot of the regular mobs have have specific weaknesses that you’ll want to exploit. Tidus hits fast enemies, Wakka takes down the flyers, Auron with piercing is best for enemies with high defence, and so on. It made most of the random encounters pretty trivial, as you generally just needed to use the right tool for each job, but the flexibility of swapping in chracters mid-battle created some very satisfying tactical considerations, especially in some of the bigger boss moments.
One thing I especially appreciated was how quickly the game gives you most of the party. Compared to Final Fantasy IX, where you don’t even get the final character until absurdly late, Final Fantasy X gets your core cast assembled relatively early. Sure, Rikku doesn’t join until about 10 hours in, but the other 6 characters are in your party nearly from the get-go.
The Equipment/Aeon Customization system
The equipment system, however, is a bit weird. Weapons and armor don’t really have traditional stats. Instead, they have slots containing abilities. One sword might give Auron +5% Strength while another gives elemental damage or counterattacks. Later, Rikku unlocks the ability to customize equipment by consuming massive piles of items to fill empty slots with abilities.
I barely touched this system.
The customization costs felt absurdly high for relatively minor benefits, and there’s NO way to undo modifications. I couldn’t justify spending 20 mega-Phoenix to embue one piece of amour with Auto-Phoenix on an armour I might need to replace eventually. I mostly just made do with whatever gear I found naturally. The same applies to Yuna’s Aeons, which are this games Summons. They can also be customized using enormous quantities of items. Sometimes it was tempting to give one of them a new spell, but raising one aeon’s single stat by a single point would cost ~30 spheres. It was something I was never willing to commit to doing.
Also, I didn’t engage with this system because the main story really didn’t need it. Sure, there were difficult bosses. Seymour on Mt. Gagazet took me several attempts. The optional Baaj Temple boss underwater where you can only use Tidus, Wakka, and Rikku while dealing with petrification and party members being swallowed for a turn was rough. But overall, I didn’t find the main game especially punishing. I’ve read that in the HD Remake, the Dark Aeons are brutally difficult, but that’s not a feature in my game so I can’t really comment on it.
End-game grind
One of the things I appreciated most about Final Fantasy X. was the fact that I could just play it. In most of the games I’ve played in this series so far, I’ve had a guide handy at almost all times. But Final Fantasy X was different. Perhaps it’s a by-product of the linear nature of the game, but I didn’t look at a guide until I was nearly finished and I wanted to dabble in getting some of the celestial weapons. And I was so happy that I was able to beat the final boss without grinding at all through the entire game.
Unfortunately, getting those celestial weapons was locked behind some tedious grinding that I just wasn’t willing to engage with. I only managed to get Tidus’s celestial weapon, and I think that’s enough, because having a whole party kitted out with the best gear in the game would make the final battles utterly trivial. And those celestial weapons are wildly over-powered. From breaking the damage cap, to tippling the Overdrive meter, to reducing the spell cost down to 1MP for Lulu and Yuna, these weapons are wild, but they’re really tedious to earn.
Near the end of the game you unlock a monster arena, where the proprietor asks you to go out and capture 10 of every enemy. Doing so gives you gobs of items and unlocks some tougher battles for better prizes, but the idea of just running back across the whole world capturing enemies is a lot more tedium than I’m willing to embark on. I’m already most of the way through a Living Dex in Pokemon, I don’t feel like doing it here too. Yuna and Auron’s weapons are gated behind this monster arena, while Lulu, Kimahri, and Tidus’s weapons are hidden behind some mini-games.
I’ve read horror stories about Tidus’s weapon, needing to win a Chocobo race with randomly placed balloons and birds. Some people report spending hours trying to win and failing. I somehow managed to win it on my 4th try. Lulu’s weapon requires you to dodge a randomly occurring lightning strike 200 times in a row. Kimahri has you hunting butterflies while dodging random encounters.
I haven’t even talked about Blitzball yet. It’s a sport that you can play, and there’s one mandatory match in the whole game. It’s kind of a shame the way they framed that one match, as you and your players are hopelessly out-matched. Your first game of Blitzball is a frustrating experience which made me never want to touch it again. By working your way through the tournaments you unlock overdrives and the celestial weapon for Wakka, but I found Blitzball to be a frustrating mess of a game. Each character has half a dozen stats and when you try to do an action based on those stats, it’s not deterministic. There’s a random variable element that means sometimes you’ll just be unlucky in your shot. I get that’s a better way to emulate sport, but I wasn’t willing to pour several hours into a mini-game that I didn’t enjoy.
All of this doesn’t really matter to me though. It’s unnecessary to get those celestial weapons, as cool as it is to be overpowered. They exist for the players who want to bring the battle system to it’s logical conclusion. For me, I’m happy enough just finishing the main story.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I had a fantastic time with Final Fantasy X. Sure, there are scenes where the age of the game shows itself. There are awkward animations and weird PS2-era stiffness. But the story is genuinely excellent, the characters are memorable, the combat remains satisfying moment to moment, and Spira feels like a real world with history, culture, religion, and consequences.
At this point, I would comfortably place Final Fantasy X among the best Final Fantasy games I’ve played so far. Certainly head and shoulders above the PS1 trilogy of games, but I’m not quite so sure if it supplants IV, V, and VI in my heart yet. It might, but I’m not ready to commit to a firm ranking yet.
But I will say that I do not want to be done with Spira yet. So I’m going to play Final Fantasy X-2 next, which I hadn’t originally planned on doing. I have vague memories of trying it about fifteen years ago and bouncing off almost immediately. I remember the opening J-pop concert scene, and the game play being focused around costume changes and then turning the game off after maybe half an hour. But now that I’m so much more familiar with the characters and the lore, I hope I’ll find a lot more joy this time around.
Final Fantasy X represents a pretty major shift for the franchise. Core series staples like the ATB that have been a staple were tossed out, voice acting was introduced, and the FMV cut scenes are just getting better and better. It’s another generational leap forward, and even 25 years later, the story still holds up to this day. I know some people hold Final Fantasy X as “the last good Final Fantasy”, which I doubt is fair. Nevertheless, I will continue to move forward in this series. Hope to see you again, soon.
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.
