Visit the Nihonbashi bridge!
After finally getting 🌸 Iki to the table again, relearning the rules, and playing a game, we did something we wanted for a long time. Finally tried ⛩️ Akebono, the expansion to Iki! 😊 Spoiler alert: this is an all around great expansion!
The most visible change are two new extension boards you put left and right of the main game board. This practically doubles the board size, but one of them is only there for holding cards, which already needed space next to the board anyway. So the table space required isn’t completely doubled, and it does improve the table presence by a lot! 🤩
The biggest thing is a new location, the Nihonbashi bridge 🌉, which extends the rondel by one space. It was already pretty hard getting to where you wanted to on the rondel, so making it longer might seem counter-intuitive, but don’t fret: The new location lets you do actions you would do at another shop normally, so you aren’t always hard-pressed to rush to specific places. Actions are granted by ships 🛶 that players can build throughout the game, plus there is a trade-track you go up on as others use your ships, increasing your income.
There are also personality cards here that give you ongoing abilities or end game scoring conditions. 👉 You can freely take one of the two cards when you arrive at the bridge, but the cards only refresh with the next season.
Standard Iki doesn’t have a huge amount of variability, but Akebono also helps with this. Tokens and cards were mostly the same in every game, now there are some special new character cards, buildings and more tokens. A refreshing boost to the standard pool of components, to complement the new mechanics. 😉
Finally, there is a new 2-player 👥 variant added. Basically it’s just a 3rd meeple walking the rondel in the opposite direction, making player cards in the shops level up. Because you know in advance how much the meeple will move, you can plan for this and take advantage of it. A really simple tweak, but it meaningfully improves 2p games!
If you like Iki, then adding Akebono should be a no-brainer.
And if you haven’t tried Iki yet, then… do it! 😁
