Tokaido

Today Kage, Hector and I went on a wonderful vacation across Japan in Tokaido. In this game you travel across one of the most magnificent roads of Japan, and along the way you try to have the most spectacular journey. You can go to temples, pick up souvenirs, and see wondrous views, go to hot springs, and try delicious food. At the end of the game, it’s all about who had the most cultured and varied experience.

At the beginning of the game each person picks their character through a random draw of two. Each character has an advantage on their traveling journey. Once picked, then a colour is picked, and there is a spot on your character to pop in a circle with that colour, and you will have the coordinating meeple and scoring track disc colour. Your character, made out of cardboard, will also tell you how many coins you start with. As you go across the track, you pick where you go out of the available stops, including the temple (where you can donate coins), the farm to collect three coins, the souvenir shop, the hot springs, the mountain view, grass view, and sea view, as well as picking people to visit, before you go back to the next point where you pick food. The play is really straight forward with whoever is in “last” picking where they want to go, and everything is very intuitive and easy to remember and understand.

In two player games, such as what we played, you also use a grey meeple. Whoever is in first place on the road as it comes up to the grey meeple’s turn gets to choose what that meeple does. The random extra player can always donate one gold to the temple, but when they pick through random draw which food they get at the inn, it just disappears off the board. Their “points” don’t count in the end.

If you get four different types of souvenirs (food, clothing, art, culture) you get 7 points, and so long as you can afford to get a different food at each inn you stop along the road you will get six points per food. Finishing the vista views first gives you an additional three point card, and you get all the points of the vistas you collected as well. The person with the highest donation to the temple gets 10 points, second 7, and so on.

This is one of the prettiest games you will come across, and for this game of exploration, the pictures really do make the difference. The pieces are simple, but well designed, and work well. The artwork is exquisite. While this game played incredibly quickly for us (probably because we have played it a lot) it is always fun to look at and try to build the pretty vistas.

I quite enjoy this game two players because it goes really quickly and depending on which character you pick your decisions and the play through will be different each time (not to mention the cards are also shuffled each time so it shouldn’t always be the same experience). That being said, we’ve also used this game as a starter for people who aren’t really gamers and don’t really know a lot about modern board gaming, having taught it and played it through with Kage’s mother earlier in the year. It is straight forward and simple gateway game for people who don’t have a lot of experience beyond Monopoly and Life.

Kage’s Notes: This is my go to game for deceptive appearances, the theme of this game; “taking a vacation” and relaxing is about as far from a very cutthroat movement/placement game as you can get, but there it is. It’s also gorgeous to look at, with the art and design being fantastic, even for the rather simple board. The game also plays quite differently and more strategically in a 2 player game, as taking into account the neutral meeple is a big part of the strategy.

It’s also a great gateway game. Simple to learn, yet competitive to play, with a neutral theme which does not need a player to be interested in typical board game tropes like fantasy or sci-fi. I’ll also note that there are a couple of expansions to this game, but we do not own them. I’ve played with them both and though they are decent, they add to the complexity of the came considerably and one of the things that makes Tokaido so great is it’s simplicity.

The Teal Dear

Game: Tokaido
Designer: Antoine Bauza
Price: $45
Players: 2-5
2 player Scaling: Quite good
Playtime: 45 minutes
Estimated Lifespan: Forever, good gateway game
Average Play Frequency: Every couple of months
Complexity: 2
Components: 4.5
Bang for Buck: 5
Value for Time: 4.5
Fun Factor: 4.5
Overall: 4.5