The battle of tiny daimyos

Do you like micro games? I always find them fascinating. Games that have just a few components and fit in a small box, but still manage to provide fun. 🥰
Micro Dojo 🏯 is our most recent game of this category - it’s basically just a small punchboard sheet of tiles (though you could get a boxed version with cool looking meeples instead 👌). It’s a fast tactical 2-player game 🤼, that also has a solo mode.

The game is played on a 3x3 dojo board, where each grid space depicts bonuses. There are 4 characters on the board - 🧐 on your turn you pick one to move orthogonally, place your daimyo marker on it, then get the bonuses of the space moved into. On subsequent turns you cannot choose a character with a daimyo marker, so at any time you actually only have 2 characters to choose from. If you play the advanced mode, the 4 characters all have special movement abilities to switch things up! 💪

Places you move into have different bonuses:
🍙 Food and coins which are the 2 resources needed for everything in the game
⛩️ Constructing a building (out of 6 that are randomly dealt out at setup) that either gives an ongoing ability or an activatable one
🅰️ Doing actions: either activating your buildings, trading resources or donating them for victory points, or triggering an objective.

Each game is played with 5 random objectives. When someone uses an action to trigger an objective, the left-most one is checked: whoever fulfills the condition on it, gains victory points. This leads us to the 2 possible end game conditions 🏆: either when someone reaches 7 VPs, or if the 5th objective is scored, the game ends. Point rewards scale up so games can end quickly - you always gotta look out for the best moves, and try to block your opponent! 🕵️

I love how even though it really is a tiny game, you get variability at setup thanks to both the building tiles and the objectives, plus you also have the advanced mode where characters have unique movement rules.
And this Dojo really is Micro: you could easily fit it on a fold up airplane table! 🤩