Our new comfort game

Atiwa has become somewhat of a comfort game for us. 🥰 I have to confess, first time we played I thought it didn’t offer many new things, and had a bit of a regret purchasing it. This feeling went away pretty fast after a few days as I started to think “Man, I want to play Atiwa again!”. 😁 It offers a euro experience but it’s pretty low-stress and plays quite fast. Perfect if you don’t have time or desire for heavier games.

It’s all standard worker placement, so occupied spaces are blocked. However there are so many spaces, that you will always find some place to go, and they all help you in some way - this is what makes it so stress-free, there is no “Oh I took something that you really needed, so you are practically out of the game now” feeling. To still bring a bit of tightness back into the game, you only have 3 workers. There is never a round where I am not like “I wish I had a 4th one”. 😅 So even though every action is useful in some way, you do have some limitations, so you have to optimize things to get more points in the end.

Atiwa has the perfect amount of fiddliness that I crave as a board gamer. You have a bunch of tokens on your supply board that you put on your location cards as you gain them, but will go back onto the supply board upon spending them. It’s also a really clever and unique system, as the more things you have out, the more things you will produce, so the whole game has this engine building aspect to it.

There are many worker spots, but I think analysis paralysis is nicely kept in check by the gentle nudging of the breeding phases - each round you will need a certain amount of tokens out, to get bonus tokens through breeding. Other than that your main goal is to get many families and location cards, as these are the biggest sources of victory points. Families also produce gold which get you even more points and are also the main cost of location cards.

I think Atiwa is just a great all-rounder lightweight euro for every kind of gamer. It’s chill and fun, but leaves room for min-max players too. 🙃