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Game Review: Yedo

February 1, 2013 by Paul Beasi 3 Comments

Curry favor with the Shōgun–or maybe assassinate him!
Bits & Blips: Manga Bookshelf Edition

Every October from several thousand kilometers away I try to live vicariously through others’ accounts of Internationale Spieltage SPIEL, the largest board gaming convention in the world, also known simply as Essen after the German city in which it is held. Hundreds of games are unveiled publicly for the first time here, some of which will eventually be released worldwide within weeks or months. But some of the games released might never make their way to United States except through importers, and since getting heavy games across the ocean is an expensive endeavor, the cost to obtain these games can be significant. That means limiting myself to one or two of them and that means research. There were a lot of new games with significant buzz coming out of Essen ‘12, but most of them were slowly getting released here. One that particularly caught my eye was a game from a pair of designers from Belgium called Yedo published by eggertspiele / Pegasus Spiele. It didn’t have a lot of buzz, had no US release planned, and it was the designers’ first effort, but the people who played it really seemed to like it and it looked stunning. I decided to take a chance on it.

Best. Decision. Ever.

In Yedo, a worker placement/auction style game, each player is a Clan Elder trying to curry favor with the new Shōgun who rules Japan from the city of Yedo (also known Edo–see this designer diary for information on the name–which is modern day Tokyo). This is primarily accomplished by completing missions to earn money and prestige points (PP). The player with the most prestige points at the end of the game is the winner.

Gameplay:

Yedo lasts for 11 rounds (unless someone assassinates the Shōgun). There are two versions of the game: Geisha and Samurai. For this review, I will cover the more challenging Samurai version. I’ll discuss the differences at the end.

cardsAt the beginning of the game, players will each receive some money, two disciples, an action card, four missions, and a favor. Players will use the disciples to gather the various items needed to complete missions and can acquire more disciples during the course of the game in order to accomplish more in a single turn. The action cards grant the owners special, usually powerful single-use abilities that can be used at various points throughout the game. The favor grants the owner a special starting bonus which could include money, cards, or even a blessing. Each favor’s bonus is unique, however after collecting the bonus players flip the card over and may use it once during the game as a blackmail card or keep it for 2 PP at the end of the game.

The missions are the crux of the game. They come in four colors which are indicative of their difficulty to complete. Green missions are the easiest, followed by yellow, red, and the high scoring but extremely hard black missions. Early on players will need to complete some of the easier missions in order to be able to collect the items needed for the harder missions. There are also five mission types: Warfare, Kidnapping, Theft, Espionage, and Assassination.

greenmission redmission

Once the game begins, players may bid in an auction on various assets: Action cards, Bonus Cards, Weapons, Annexes, Geisha, Disciples, and Mission cards. The assets are divided up into three color groups; in two and three player games, players bid on one of these color groups and in a four or five player game players bid on a specific asset. The starting bidder will make an opening bid on one group or asset equal to the minimum bid printed on the board. In player order, everyone participating in the auction will have a chance to increase the bid or pass. Finally, the person who started the auction has one more chance to increase the bid or pass and then the auction ends. The winning bidder places her bid token there, collects her asset (and in some instances 2 PP), and that color group or asset is now blocked for the remainder of the bidding round. This continues until everyone has had an opportunity to acquire an asset or drop out.

Next comes the event phase which starts with upkeep of the weapons market and ends with an event. The events can be good, relatively benign, inconvenient, or downright disastrous. The most devastating ones can really wreck players’ plans, possibly causing them to lose an entire annex, a disciple, a geisha, money, or a weapon–or more than one of these! Sometimes the really bad events can be somewhat mitigated by returning your blessing. There is a full deck of 27 events and since only one is used per round, not all events will be encountered offering variety from game to game.

After the event phase, the assigning phase begins. I’m not going to go over everything here as there is a lot that can be done, but this is where players will send their disciples to the various districts or their personal annexes. The districts include the Gates, Tavern, Harbor, Red Light District, Market, Temple, and Castle. Each district has a number of available spaces (depending on the number of players) where players may place their disciples to perform actions or to complete missions. Each district has multiple actions which can be performed ranging from acquiring new annexes, geishas, weapons, blessings, or missions to buying or selling PP, changing the turn order, or performing foresight (looking at the top three cards of one of the decks and with the exception of events replacing them in any order), among other things.

board

Completing missions will require players to have one or more disciples in specified districts and may include other requirements such as specific weapons, geishas, annexes, blessings, or even a competing clan member to assassinate. The green cards are easier with fewer requirements, but the black cards will require a lot of planning to have everything needed and disciples in the right places. This phase is only for placement of disciples; performing the actions occurs later.

After all disciples have been placed, the watch patrol will move. Players know ahead of time where the watch is going to be based on the color and current location of the watch patrol marker on the board. Action cards can be used to influence the movement of the guard. If there are any disciples in the district where the watch patrol ends its movement, those disciples are arrested! Any disciples there are returned either to the reserve if the player owns more than two with the remaining going back to the player Clan House. This can be devastating! Luckily, Actions cards can be used to influence whether or not a player’s disciples are arrested. Also, the Blackmail card can be turned in to save one disciple one time, giving up the 2 PP the card would be worth at the end of the game.

After the watch patrol has been resolved, players in the Market District may freely trade weapons and/or money. Then, players in the Tavern District may freely trade weapons, money, bonus cards, action cards, geishas and/or uncompleted missions. Disciples, annexes, blessings, and completed missions may not be traded. Also, players cannot reveal what is on any card that they trade; they may only state that they believe the card would be useful to the other person. Honesty is not a requirement!

In the final phase, players will begin activating their disciples to perform the actions available in the district or to complete missions. Mission cards have two halves; the top half is the Standard reward which must be completed and the bottom half is a Bonus reward which is optional. For the Standard reward, a disciple in one of the required districts will be returned to the Clan House in order to complete the mission. Any other disciples required for the Standard reward or Bonus reward may remain on their locations meaning they will be able to complete other missions or perform actions. Thus, the order in which actions are resolved can be very important.

blackmissionAt the end of this phase, the next round will begin until 11 rounds have been played. That is, unless one player has completed the Kill the Shōgun black mission! If this happens, the game ends immediately at the end of the round.

At the end of the game, players will score any accumulated bonus cards (which I didn’t mention in the review but they score PP based on a variety of end game conditions) and their Blackmail card if they didn’t use it. The Clan with the most Prestige Points wins!

Theme and Artwork:

This game is dripping with theme and I love it! The mission cards all have wonderful flavor text and the requirements generally make thematic sense. Combined with with the absolutely stunning, colorful artwork this game really puts you in 16th century Japan.

The only extremely minor issue with the artwork is that the annexes are all similar looking and when trying to figure out which is which on the mission cards, you have to pay extra attention. But this is only barely a quibble worth mentioning. All of the art is lovely. It’s one of the most striking games I have in my collection and it always gets complimented when I introduce it to people.

Rulebook and English Translation:

I have a lot of board games and therefore a lot of rulebooks. The number of problematic rulebooks far outweighs the number of good ones. This is true whether or not the game was translated from English or was written by a native English speaker, but adding translation certainly can introduce more problems. I am happy to say that both the quality of the instructions and the quality of the translation are best in class. In fact, if I didn’t know that this wasn’t a game designed by native English speakers I would never have guessed it.

The rulebook is laid out in a very well organized manner. After reading through the rules, I had almost no questions about how to play. On the back page, there is a table that summarizes what things are, where to get them, what to do with them, and important notes. The player board lists all of the phases, all of the annex functions, and all card and weapon limits. The action cards clearly indicate in which phase they can be used.

That said, there were two misprints in the English edition of the game: The Tavern and Market districts on the back page were labeled incorrectly and a couple of the yellow Assassination mission cards were misprinted as Kidnapping. Mistakes like these are common in first printings of any game and neither causes a major problem, although some of the bonus cards do rely on the types of missions completed and players will have to make sure that if a mission is labeled Kidnapping but the flavor text says to Assassinate someone that they remember that it is an Assassination mission.

Still, those mistakes aside I consider the manual the gold standard of what game manuals should be like. The translation was perfect and the rules were complete, clear, and concise.

Conclusion:

If you haven’t figured it out already, I absolutely love Yedo. It scales very well for two to five players and is a solid tactical game. This game is what Lords of Waterdeep wishes it could be. While I found that game enjoyable enough, it was an extremely dry extrapolation of Dungeons and Dragons. This is the opposite of that. The theme shines in this game. It’s really hard to explain without just experiencing it, but everything looks beautiful and the missions are highly thematic.

I mentioned earlier that there are two versions that you can play. The Samurai version includes all of the action cards and all of the events. The action cards can be very confrontational and the events can be extremely cruel. I will admit that this game has flared tempers between players and if you don’t like confrontation or having your plans utterly wrecked by the turn of a card, you will NOT want to play this version of the game. However to accommodate this there is the Geisha version of the game. In this version, the most evil event and action cards are removed from the game. Also, the watch patrol is removed completely for the 11th round of the game. These changes will not make Yedo that much easier but may make it more palatable for some, especially younger players.

I really hope that this game finds a US distributor because it deserves to be played by everyone. Yedo is easily the best game I acquired in 2012 and definitely one that will find its way to the table often. There may be a few retailers who still have leftover import copies such as Funagain Games, but otherwise you’ll have to order this directly from Germany.

If you get the chance to play, take it! You won’t regret it.

Age: 14+
Length: 120-180 mins
# of players: 2 to 5

Designers: Thomas Vande Ginste and Wolf Plancke
Pubisher: eggertspiele / Pegasus Spiele.
Artist: Franz Vohwinkel

Filed Under: Bits & Blips Tagged With: board games, Yedo

Game Review: Sutakku

December 17, 2011 by Paul Beasi Leave a Comment

Your wish is heard; a rich man you shall be!
Bits & Blips: Manga Bookshelf Edition

Once upon a time there lived a stonecutter, who went every day to a great rock in the side of a big mountain and cut out slabs for gravestones or houses. He understood very well the kinds of stones wanted for the different purposes, and as he was a careful workman he had plenty of customers. For a long time he was quite happy and contented, and asked for nothing better than what he had.

But we all know that kind of thinking won’t make you the 1%.

So says the Japanese folklore story, “The Stonecutter” which was the inspiration for this game.

Sutakku (スタック: stack) is a push-your-luck dice rolling game from Smirk & Dagger for one or more players of all ages. The game plays in five rounds, at the end of which the player with the highest score is the winner. It’s a quick game with very simple rules that anyone can learn.

Components:

Sutakku comes with 12 gorgeous 19mm (3/4”) dice, a dice bag, a score pad, a small deck of bonus cards, and a two-piece gameboard which players can use for building their dice stacks. The board also serves as a translator since the dice use Japanese kanji instead of pips which adds to the flavor of the game.

I can’t praise the dice in this game enough. I love both the size and the debossed Japanese numbers. They are quite heavy and hit the table with a satisfying “thunk” when you roll them. For me, this is important stuff for a dice game and Smirk & Dagger doesn’t disappoint here.

The rules also include the complete tale of “The Stonecutter”.

Gameplay:

The goal is to make a stack of dice that’s worth as many points as possible without “busting”, which means getting a “0” score for that round. When creating your stack, each die added to the stack must be the same or higher value than the die below it. This is not a dexterity game, so if the stack falls over there is no penalty; simply rebuild it.

On your turn, you’ll roll three dice. Two dice must then be added to the stack (or start a new stack if this is your first roll). If you cannot add two dice, you’ve busted! If you can add two, you do so and then it’s decision time: do you roll again or do you stop? If you stop, you score your dice (see “Scoring”). If you decide to continue, you’ll again roll three dice and will have to add two of them to the top of stack. As the number on the top of the stack gets higher, it becomes less likely that you’ll roll successfully. But the points…!

Once per round, a player may take a “mulligan” to attempt to get better results. However, only two dice are rerolled and both of them must be able to be added to the stack.

If you roll doubles and the doubles are higher than the third die, you can stack all three dice (assuming the third die is at least as high as the die on the top of the stack). If you roll legal triples, you may stack all three dice. If you roll a triple which can’t be played, you get a free reroll.

Scoring:

If a player stops rolling without busting, their score for the round is calculated. The score is equal to the number of dice in the stack multiplied by the number on top of the stack. So a stack of four dice with a 6 showing on top is worth 6 × 4 = 24 points.

There are bonuses available for living dangerously. If you continue rolling when the top die of your stack is a 5 and you succeed, then you get 50 bonus points. If you do this with a 6 at the top of your stack, you get 100 bonus points.

A real challenge is to try and create a tower of all twelve dice. Doing this successfully will net you 200 points in addition to any other bonuses you earned. There are special rules for what to do when you only have one or two dice left to roll which will help. It’s still a fairly unlikely but magnificent feat if pulled off.

At the end of the fifth round, the scores are totaled and the player with the highest score wins.

But wait, there’s more:

Smirk & Dagger games are generally known for having a “take that” aspect to them. Sutakku didn’t originally have anything like this in the game, and apparently during pre-release plays the fans and reviewers were disappointed in this oversight. Personally, I don’t understand the mentality that a game company should be required to live up to some sort of reputation for a specific mechanic in all of their games, but regardless the call for player screwage was answered and some bonus cards were added to the game.

When playing with the optional cards, the player who wins the right to go first gets one automatically. Subsequently, any player who busts while attempting to build on a stack of only two or three dice will gain a card. The cards are usually meant to be played on another player, but some may be played on yourself if you like. Most of them are pre-roll challenges where the player who gets the card played on her has to meet stricter criteria in order to avoid busting. There are also after-roll challenges and counter action cards. Often there is a risk associated with the cards in the form of a bonus if the roller manages to meet the challenge. Only one card may be played on a player at a time.

My test group played several games both with and without the cards. We found the game enjoyable either way. If you’re playing with any sensitive players in the group, leave the cards out. They are good, but not good enough to warrant making a player feel targeted if that’s not the kind of game they are into.

Conclusion:

Sutakku is a good addition to the field of push your luck dice rolling games. If you enjoy Farkle, Cosmic Wimpout, or Can’t Stop then this game will probably fit well in your collection. Plus, the dice alone are worth the price of admission.

If you’re looking for strategy, well, there really isn’t any here short of understanding odds and honestly if you’re putting that much thought into this game then you’re probably over-thinking it. This is a quick filler or a “Hey, I think I’m not too drunk to count and stack dice” kind of game.

Sutakku retails for $24.99 but the street price is around $17.00.

Age: All
Length: 15 mins
# of players: 1+
Designer: Curt Covert
Artist: Chiyo Nagahara Romei, Curt Covert
Pubisher: Smirk & Dagger Games

Filed Under: Bits & Blips, Game reviews, REVIEWS Tagged With: board games, dice games, games, sutakku

Game Review: Hanabi

December 13, 2011 by Paul Beasi 7 Comments

Playing with fireworks is fun!
Bits & Blips: Manga Bookshelf Edition

French designer Antoine Bauza made a name for himself with big hits such as Ghost Stories and 7 Wonders, the latter of which netted him the 2011 Kennerspiel des Jahres, the German award presented for the Enthusiast Game of the Year. However, the lesser known but highly praised card game Hanabi originally published by Les XII Singes and later published in a different format by Asmodee and Cocktail Games is every bit as good as its two siblings. The original edition that I’m using for this review also includes a second game called Ikebana playable with the same components, but I will only be covering Hanabi.

Hanabi (花火, flower fire) is the Japanese word for fireworks. In this game, 2 to 5 players will be working together as a team of inattentive pyrotechnics experts who accidentally mixed up the components of a large fireworks display and must help each other try to create a spectacle which will be judged by the International Federation of Pyrotechnics Experts. Succeed and render the crowd speechless. Fail, and you might be booed off of the stage!

Hanabi is a cooperative card game which means everyone will be playing together to try and get the highest score possible for the team. The catch? You can see everyone else’s hands of cards, but you can’t see your own! Players will be holding their cards facing outward and may not look at the cards in their own hands.

Gameplay:

The deck consists of 50 cards in five colors (red, orange, blue, black and green). Each color consists of the following cards: 1,1,1,2,2,3,3,4,4,5. At the beginning of the game, the cards are shuffled together and a hand of either 4 (4 or 5 players) or 5 (2 or 3 players) is dealt to everyone. The cards are picked up by each player with the backs facing them so that they cannot see their own hands but may see everyone else’s. The game also includes colored tokens. 8 blue tokens are placed on the table in the box cover and three red tokens are placed next to the box cover on the table.

The goal of the game is to build five complete fireworks displays. This is accomplished by making five stacks of cards (one in each color) that go from 1 to 5 in sequential order. On your turn, you must take one of only three possible actions:

  1. Give information to one of the other players
  2. Discard a card to discard area
  3. Play a card to the display area

Giving information to another player costs one blue token which will be removed from the box cover. If there are no blue tokens available, then you cannot give information and must perform one of the other two actions; you may not pass. When giving information, you are allowed to tell one player about the quantity and location of all cards that are the same color, all cards that have the same value, or the absence of a card of one color or value in that player’s hand. For example, you could say “You have two green cards; here and here,” or “You have three 2s; here, here, and here,” or “You have no blue cards.” No one else may say anything and you must give information about all of the cards that match. So if you are telling a player about red cards, you must point out all of the cards which are red.

When discarding a card, you will simply declare that you are discarding a card and then place that card in the discard area. This card is out of play permanently, but it will now be visible to everyone including yourself. You then draw a card from the deck so that you have the same number of cards that you started with. But more importantly, you may return one of the blue tokens to the box cover. This is how you “recycle” the blue tokens so that more clues can be given. Remember, you only start with 8 blue tokens and no one knows anything about his own hand!

Finally, you may play a card to the display area. To do this, you need only declare that you are playing a card to the display area. You do not have to state what the card is or on which firework you are playing it. If the card may be legally played as the start of a new firework or on an existing firework, hooray! You place the card in its proper location in the display, draw a replacement and play passes to the next person. If the card was a legally played 5, then as a reward for completing the firework you get to return a blue token to the box cover. But be careful; if the card was not a legal play (e.g. you played a blue 4, but the top card on the blue pile was a 2, or you played a red 1 but there was already a red firework started) then you cause an explosion! You place one of the red tokens in the box cover. If you place the third red token, the game ends immediately. Your display goes up in flames and the team loses the game!

Play continues until either the third red token has been used, all 5 fireworks have been completed, or the draw deck runs out. If the draw deck runs out, players continue with the cards remaining in their hands until the person who drew the last card gets one additional turn.

Those are all of the rules. The rules are easy, but the strategy is the fun part.

Scoring:

At the end of the game, the top cards in each stack will be added together. The higher you score, the more impressed the crowd is and the better your rating.

Strategy:

Players have to work together to figure out which cards they are holding. Information is very limited, so frequently players will need to infer additional information from the information they are given. For example, if the blue firework display is currently at 3, and someone tells you “you have a blue card; here,” did she tell you that because it’s a 4 and you should play it? Probably. Other times it will take information from more than one player to narrow down a card. Remember, you’re not allowed to give advice to the other players.

The card distribution is also important to remember. There are three 1s in each color, so losing one of those will probably not be a big deal. But there are only two of the 2 through 4 value cards and only one of each 5. If someone discards a blue 3, the other blue 3 will suddenly be very important because if it gets discarded, the blue firework display will never be able to reach completion.

Giving other players information about what card or cards they can safely discard will also help the team regain valuable blue tokens. For example, if all of the fireworks have been started, then all further 1s will be useless.

Memory is very important since each player will be getting information about her hand that may or may not be immediately useful. I often find myself thinking things, “Okay, this is a 3, these two cards are blue, and this card is black. Do I know anything about the other cards? Well I guess I know they aren’t 3s, blue, or black, since I haven’t played any of these cards yet” Yes, it’s deliciously tricky!

Drawbacks:

The biggest drawback to this game is in the cards themselves.

In the original edition the art is simple yet attractive, but the colors are very hard to discern even under the best lighting conditions. The blue and black cards especially are very difficult to distinguish. Colorblind players will have an exceptionally hard time playing the game because the card suits are only differentiated by color.

In the second edition, the problems with the colors were fixed and symbols were introduced on the cards making them colorblind friendly. However, the art is somewhat more garish and the cards were made in a large square format. Since this game requires you to be holding a hand of cards up visible to all players for the entire game, anything that makes the cards more cumbersome, like an awkward shape, is just unnecessarily complicating things.

Finally, it’s a card game. Sometimes you get a bad shuffle. But that’s always the case with card games.

Conclusion:

Hanabi is a simple game to play with rules that can be learned in just a few minutes, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy game by any means. Good strategy and teamwork are required to get high scores. This game has been a big hit with my gaming group as well as non-gamers. A frequent problem with cooperative games is that one person gets bossy and essentially plays the game by himself. That can’t happen in this game by its very nature.

The rules are in French, but translations are available at BoardGameGeek in several languages.

Now for the bad news: this game is pretty hard to find in the US. Your best bets are the Canadian store Le Valet d’Coeur or the French store Ludibay. Shipping from Canada to the US is usually not bad but shipping from France can be quite expensive. It retails for around $15.

If you can find a copy, I highly recommend Hanabi.

Age: 8+
Length: 20-30 mins
# of players: 2 to 5
Designer: Antoine Bauza
Artist: Albertine Ralenti
Pubishers: Les XII Singes (Hanabi & Ikebana); Asmodee, Cocktail Games (Hanabi) (France)

Filed Under: Bits & Blips, Game reviews, REVIEWS Tagged With: board games, card games, games, Hanabi

Game Review: Tanto Cuore

December 8, 2011 by Paul Beasi 8 Comments

Do you have what it takes to be crowned “King of Maids”?
Bits & Blips: Manga Bookshelf Edition

Tanto Cuore (Italian for “Much Heart”) is a deck building game originally released in Japan by Arclight Games with the English edition published by Japanime Games in the US. The players play the “masters of the house” and will employ maids and use their services to help them expand their mansion to ultimately win the game and become the “greatest master”, the proclaimed “King of Maids”. While I was admittedly uncertain that the theme was something that I would be interested in, after playing it I discovered that with only one minor exception the fan-service is minimal, the cards are tasteful, and on the surface the theme is rather innocent. But is it a good game? Yes!

Deck building games came into popularity with the creation of a game called “Dominion” by Donald X. Vaccarino in 2008. Since then, the genre has exploded with many other titles using this mechanism. Personally, I was not very fond of Dominion. There is little player interaction (although later expansions addressed this somewhat), the art is not particularly to my tastes, and the game play feels very mechanical and dry with few paths to victory. Tanto Cuore addresses all of these issues.

But first, a primer on the mechanics of a deck building game.

Deck building is something that players of collectible card games (CCG) and trading card games (TCG)—such as Magic, The Gathering and Pokémon—are very familiar with. However in a deck building game, constructing the deck is actually part of the game as opposed to the precursor to the game. Everyone starts out with the same cards in their deck; generally weaker cards that will be used to gain more powerful cards. Each turn you start with a hand of cards drawn from your deck, play some cards from your hand, perform actions based on what you play, and then move the used and unused cards to your discard pile and draw a new hand of cards. Each player then repeats these steps in succession.

I ♥ you!

When you need to draw a card and your deck is depleted, you shuffle the discards. Thus, you know which cards are in your deck but not where they are or what order they will come up in. The strategy is building a deck that contains cards that will help you achieve your goal of getting victory points. If your deck gets too big, it might take you too long to get the cards you need and the chances of getting all of the ones you want in one draw get worse. Therefore, another important goal is getting the weaker cards out of your hand or upgrading them to better cards. The mechanisms for this vary by game, but in the end the idea is usually the same: build an efficient yet powerful deck that will yield you the most Victory Points (VP) at the end of the game.

Gameplay:

In Tanto Cuore, there are three categories of cards available in the “town” (play area): Maid cards, Love cards, and Event cards. The Maid cards include maid chiefs, general maids, and private maids. The Love cards have a value of 1, 2, or 3 “love”. The Event cards include Bad Habit and Illness cards. Every player’s initial hand has 7 “1 love” cards and 3 “Colette” maid chief cards which do little but are worth 1 Victory Point (VP) at the end of the game. A turn is divided into four phases: the Starting phase, the Serving phase, the Employ phase, and the Dismiss phase.

On each turn, a player is allotted one “serving” (which means playing one maid card) and one “employ” (which means buying a new card with “love” cards). Certain cards you purchase may grant you additional bonuses, such as additional servings, additional employs, the ability to draw cards, or extra love. Some cards are also worth victory points simply for having them. It’s beyond the scope of this review to detail what all of the cards do, but learning how they interact with each other is crucial to winning the game. For example, playing a maid card that gives you +1 serving means that you’ll be able to play another maid card on this turn. If you chain several of these together you can do even more. Playing cards in the proper order to maximize their potential is therefore very important.

Sample Maid card

The private maids are special. They each have an ability that occurs during the start phase of your turn and are worth positive or negative VP. The deck has 10 unique private maids, two of which are visible at a given time and only one of which may be employed on your turn even if you have gained extra employment capabilities from other maids. These maids are placed in your “private quarters”. These are cards that are no longer in your deck but still count at the end of the game for scoring purposes. When you employ a private maid, you may place her in your private quarters or in the private quarters of one of your opponents. Each player may only have one active private maid at a time, so employing a new one will replace any previous one, eliminating that maid’s special ability (but not the VP—positive or negative, those will be scored at the end of the game).

The game comes with 16 different types of general maids. 10 of these will be selected for use in the game. There is a recommended starter setup in the manual for beginners, but you can choose the 10 maids to be used randomly, by a draft, or whatever way your group decides. In this way, the game will be different every time you play. You’ll have to adjust your strategy appropriately based on the cards that are (or aren’t) available.

Tanto Cuore offers alternate paths to victory which is one of the things I really like about the game. Purchasing the high end Chief Maid will earn you 6 VP and is a significant way to gain points. However, the private maids are worth varying amounts of VP and some of the general maids are as well. Also, some of the maids are “chamber maids”. These maids can moved to your private quarters by using one or two servings, depending on the maid. Doing this not only gets them out of your deck—which as you’ll remember from above can be quite useful—but there is also a “set collection” mechanic introduced in this game where having either a certain quantity or a certain variety of maids in your quarters will earn you extra points at the end of the game. This, however, leads me to the other method of player interaction in the game: Events.

Bad habits involve frogs?

Illness cards may be played by your opponents on any of the maids in your private chamber. If a maid is still ill at the end of the game, she will be removed from play and her VPs will be lost. Also, she will not count in any of the sets she may have been a part of. Finally, if your private maid becomes ill, her special ability will not occur during your start phase. There are several ways to remove illness cards from your maids depending on the cards that are in play. Also, you can always choose to discard a “3 love” card to cure a maid, but this is a very painful choice since “3 love” cards cost 7 love to employ. Still, it might be worth it. Interestingly, you may also play an illness card on one of your own private maids if you don’t want the negative victory points or effects this maid has.

Finally, your maids may acquire “Bad Habits” from your opponents. Bad habits are worth -1 VP each at the end of the game unless you have four or more of them, in which case they are worth -2 VP each. Like illnesses, there are various ways to remove the Bad Habits from your private quarters.

The games ends when two of the maid piles have been depleted. Once this happens, the player who caused the game ending condition will finish her turn and the game is over. Sick maids are removed from the game and then victory points and bonuses are added up. Finally, the negative points for Bad Habits are applied. Whoever has the highest VP total is the “King of Maids”!

Artwork:

The cards in this game have extremely lovely artwork by 25 Japanese illustrators. Therefore, each card has a very unique look and style. While normally I would find this jarring in a game, I think it works very well here. In a way, it showcases the many different styles of drawing used in Japanese media. Who knew there were so many ways to draw a French maid?

My biggest concern was that the artwork was going to be too ecchi for me. While I don’t always have issues with ecchi, it’s not what I would be looking for in a game and it would make it difficult for me to introduce the game to my generally non-Otaku gaming group. Thankfully, most of the cards tend to be moe rather than ecchi. The maids all feel like real characters, even the more unusual ones like the “napping maid”. The love cards are a little suggestive and one of the private maids has a panty shot with a little more, ah, personal detail than I’d like, but I’ll give that a pass because the Esquine Forét card’s awesomeness totally makes up for it.

The recommended age on the box says 12 and up. I would say, like with anything, check it out first and then decide what’s best for your children.

Was that really necessary?

Tiny moe maid with extremely large weaponry! Yeah!

Drawbacks:

Like all deck building games, if you randomly select your cards you could end up with a combination that doesn’t work very well together. Conceivably, everyone’s final score could be negative. Generally this is not going to happen but it is something to consider.

Also, illnesses and bad habits are relatively cheap to inflict on other players, but very expensive (or impossible) to remove if the right cards are not in play. I don’t see this being a big problem, but it could frustrate some players. This wasn’t an issue in any of the games I played, but I could envision scenarios where it would be.

The only downside to the artwork is that the text is extremely small. You’ll definitely need to get your reading glasses out for this game.

Finally, the price. At $50 MSRP, it’s fairly expensive for what amounts to a large deck of cards. However, the street price at online shops is around $40 and when you consider that unlike CCGs and TCGs there are no booster packs and “rares” to be chasing after and thus no secondary market price inflation, it’s still a pretty good deal. Everything you need to play is in the box.

Conclusions:

Should you get this game? Yes! If you are fan of manga or anime (or a maid fetishist) and have not played games like this before, you might have a slightly steeper learning curve than your average hobby gamer but once you play through it a couple of times you should pick it up fairly easily. If you are a gamer and aren’t put off by the theme then I strongly suggest giving this game a try even if, like me, you aren’t a fan of Dominion. Tanto Cuore improves upon the core mechanics of a deck building game by adding alternate paths to victory and player interaction. The art is fantastic and the theme surprisingly works well even outside of Japan.

There are two expansions for the game which can be played alone or in addition to the cards in this game, but currently they are only available in Japan. The first expansion, Expanding the House, will be available from Japanime Games in early 2012.

Age: 12+
Length: 30-60 mins
# of players: 2 to 4

Designer: Masayuki Kudou
Pubisher: Arclight Games (Japan), Japanime Games (US)
Artists:

Tohru Adumi
CARNELIAN
COMTA
Takahito Ekuchi
Takuya Fujima
Takehito Harada
Akira Hayase
Kira Inugami
Ishigaa
kawaku
KEI
Souji Kusaka
Misa Matoki
Rin Minase
Miki Miyashita
Misoka Nagatsuki
Nana
Aoi Nanase
Hiroki Ozaki
Poyoyon Rock
Ruchie
Satoru Satou
Mushimaro Tachikawa
Yuiko Tokui
Ofuu Yamadori

Filed Under: Bits & Blips, Game reviews, REVIEWS Tagged With: board games, card games, games, tanto cuore

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