A beautifully tight game of edo life
🌸 Iki 🌸 is played in the Nihonbashi district of Edo. During the game you will employ all kinds of vendors, artisans and performers. With their help you drive the prosperity and well-being of the city and try to become the best “Child of Edo” in one year.
Iki uses a rondel mechanic. You will be moving along in a circle visiting different shops and activating character cards to gain their effect. Each turn you have to pick how much you will move - your choices are restricted based on the turn order.
The game is split into 4 seasons, 12 months. Each season has its own tokens and character cards that can be acquired. At the end of a season your characters bring you additional income, but you also have to feed them. (I really miscalculated in our first game and lost 2 of my 4 character cards after the very first season. 😅 ) There are also fires🔥 coming at the end of the 5th, 8th and 11th round. These randomly strike one of the four storefronts. You can be lucky, but it is best if you’re well prepared by raising your fire fighting power beforehand.
🌸 Iki 🌸 is a very tight game. You only get 12+1 turns, but there is a lot to do. The possibilities of where to go are also sometimes quite limited due to the movement you must do, or due to lack of money.🤔 There are lots of ways to earn points though, so you can always do something useful even if plans have to be changed.
I was curious about the replayability of the game as certain tokens will always be the same in a given season, but because the shops will be filled with different character cards every time, other building cards might be on offer and there is a lot of strategies to try - I am sure the game will be fun every time.👌
☝️There are some changes for a 2-player game. You use the backside of the board with less places for cards and blocking tokens restricting your choice of movement values. After every round you will also be placing neutral characters on the board so stores are better populated.
😍 I love the quality of the components, the art is splendid. The resources are also quite nice - we might do some homemade upgrades for the sandal and rice tokens though.😎
