Components:These are of excellent quality with wooden meeples, good thickness cardboard and with some superb artwork. The starting player piece is a little small and hard to spot so I did have to pimp this with a Samurai on a Horse miniature, which was painted very nicely by a friend.
Gameplay:This is a fun game where players choose their actions using an innovative tile system that works really quite well, despite it also being frustrating at times as you can not do all that you want.Based in historic Japan where players are helping to build Edo into what would become Tokyo. You all start with a similar set of action options but can obtain extra action cards during the game to provide more variety. In a turn players choose 3 actions from their hand of tiles (start with 3 tiles) and place them on a holder in the order they want to take them. Each starting tile has 4 actions on it, to select the action you place the tile with intended action on the bottom in the slot. Actions are taken in turn order starting with the leftmost tile for each player and then the next etc. etc. There is a lot going in this game and it has that nice level of frustration where you want to do everything each turn but have to make tough choices. The starting actions tiles have key actions on the same tiles so by getting different action tiles you extend the choices you can make. Excellent game.
The two ending conditions are if at the end of the turn one player has 12 power points or the trade card deck is exhausted. This provides the game with a definite end point which helps but I would say that the 60min playing time is a bit optimistic especially for the first few games or if you have a lot of indecisive players. The main board has sides for 2-3 or 4 players.
The mechanics aof the game are relatively easy to pick up but the strategy on how to plan you turns in the most optimum way is definately a steep learnign curve and may take several games. There is an expansion which adds a 5th player as well as additional gaming options, which will help keep the game fresh.
Conclusions:I really enjoyed this game and both times have been with three players which seems to be quite a sweet spot but I will be intgerested to see how wel it plays with 4 and 5 players.
I can definately see me playing a lot more of this as the final scoring in the last game was pretty close, despite the various players adopting different styles. I am really glad to have this in my collection and it will certainly get a lot more table time in the near future.
