Jumping around toriis and followers

We recently had the pleasure to play ⛩️ Torii, released at Spiel 24 by EmperorS4 Games! As you can see in the photos, it has captivating artwork and great components which immediately caught our attention. 🤩 But what’s the game about you ask? 🧐

This is an abstract 2-player game where you step into the shoes of playful spirits, who jump around the symbolic gateways of Shinto shrines, called Toriis. Your goal is to outsmart your opponent by gaining followers and erecting Toriis faster than them. You win by either having placed all 4 of your Toriis or by placing all your 9 followers on the board. 🏆

Besides Toriis and followers, you have 3 action tiles with the numbers 1-2 on them. 👉On your turn you flip one of them and move your spirit that many squares on the board. You then put one of your followers on each square you touched with your movement. If a square already has a follower of the opponent on it, you replace it with yours. Whenever you have 4 followers in a line you place a Torii onto one of them and remove the rest. Toriis cannot be removed anymore and they protect the follower there. 😉

There are a few restrictions of course. ☝️ Once you flip a tile, you can’t use it until it’s flipped back - and that happens only when all 3 tokens are used. Another important rule is that the 2 spirits can never be in the same column and row, which makes maneuvering that much more interesting! 😮 Whenever you’d move to a square in line with the other spirit, you simply jump to the next one, so positioning really matters!

To spice things up, each spirit has a special ability that bends the rules in a way. While using these powers is optional, I think it is a must to include after a few initial plays to keep things interesting. 🙃

All in all Torii is a clever little abstract game. Basically there are multiple tic-tac-toe contests to place down Toriis, spiced up with the special powers - and superb components and graphic design! 🎨It plays fast and is easy to learn, but as it tends to be with abstracts, it needs a few plays to fully recognize all the options you have. So if you generally enjoy abstract games, Torii is a great one to consider. 🙂