Bats and agriculture

🦇 Atiwa is the new agricultural 🌾 euro coming from Uwe Rosenberg and Lookout Games . We found a prototype 🔧 version of the game and two empty chairs so we tried it out. We only played 4 out of 7 rounds, but we got a very good feel for the game. 🙂

The game uses simple worker placement. Everyone has 3 workers and won't get any more during the game. You use them to get different resources or terrain tiles from the worker placement spots.

👆When you gain certain resources they come off of your player board and are placed on your 3x3 terrain tiles, unlocking income and end game points. When you spend them they go back to their track. (Except gold and bats which come from the general supply).

The 3x3 terrain tiles have certain icons on each spot so you are limited on what resources you can place and have to plan accordingly. 🤔

Wild animals 🐗 give you trees 🌳 as an income (manure), trees grow fruit 🍎, fruit attract fruit bats 🦇. Bats help you plant new trees. You will also raise your population 👪 and keep goats 🐐.

As in any Rosenberg game, you have a feeding phase where you have to keep your families well fed, and also a breeding phase where certain animals or people will multiply. 😅

👆Your families can be flipped over if you train them - this way they will be able to find gold without creating pollution, and can make better use of bats. So raising population is important, but you need to also flip them or your 3x3 tiles will quickly get filled with blocking tiles! 🙉

There are a lot of worker spots and ways you can do things, and it was pretty hard to see at first what helps you the most. 🤨 At the end you get points for your uncovered points on your player board, your terrain tiles and leftover gold.

Also I believe some cards are randomly put out on the main board, so worker spots will not always be the same. During rounds you also slide an action card over which changes up some things.

I have to confess we still haven't played some Uwe classics 😶 so it's hard to gauge how good Atiwa matches up against them, but we definitely had fun playing. 🙃