It’s a busy time in the realm of Ryozen!
Tabula Games are an Italian publisher whose praises I’ve been singing ever since they contacted me and sent me copies of their unique games Mysthea and Icaion. This new game Ryozen is a bit lighter and more mainstream, possibly in order to capture a wider audience. Instead of a totally original, alien fantasy world, it’s a more family-friendly theme of anthropomorphic characters in a medieval fantasy Japanese culture.
The mechanics are lighter too, but there’s still plenty to get your teeth into. It’s a worker placement game, but in this case the workers (your ‘kin’) can be placed face-up or face-down, either to use their special ability or to increase their influence in a sector of the board. Each sector of the round board has a daytime effect you can take immediately, then at the end of the round players with kin in each sector get a nighttime effect, and the player with most influence gets a bonus. Add to that, there’s a rotating palace board in the centre, which can be activated to use the daytime effects of sectors it highlights.
There’s a lot more to it than that, with special cards, an interesting event card system where you’re getting rid of event cards to avoid their effects at the end of the turn, and even a mini exploration track where you send your kin out to build villages in the countryside!
Once you get your head through the rulebook it all flows rather elegantly, and there also many options for different play modes – a cooperative mode, solo, extra functionality for the palace board, team vs team, and an interesting semi-coop mode too.
I love the games Tabula make and this one is another winner, if it a bit less immersive than their previous games. But it’s the perfect introduction to the idiosyncratic but fascinating games made by this company.
