Matthew BaileyGame 12 of the “Bailey Family Summer 2023 Board Game Bonanza” is “Kōhaku,” played by myself and Jack (8.).
“Kōhaku” is a tile-laying game where both players are trying to make a pond filled with koi carp and features, arranging them in a grid to score the most points.
You start by shuffling the tiles and then distributing the koi and features on the three-by-four board in a checkerboard pattern so that koi are touching diagonally, and features are touching diagonally.
When it is your turn, you then need to take both a koi and a feature that are adjacent to one another. You then place these in your own personal pond, using the same checkerboard pattern rules. The difference when you place these tiles, however, is they do not have to be placed adjacent to one another and can be placed anywhere on your grid.
You then move the middle tiles to the outer edge, which means that the available pairings are constantly changing, and the grid does not remain static. This is a really interesting mechanic, which I am surprised is not present in more tile-laying games.
One thing worth noting is that, unlike some tile-laying games, there is no restriction on grid size. So, it’s worth noting that you need a fairly sizable table to play this as grids can get reasonably big, especially if someone decides to produce something fairly long and thin, although a square is probably objectively a better tactic.
There are two varieties of koi carp, one being a solid colour, which will match fewer tiles but will earn you an extra point at the end of the game, as well as two-tone koi carp, which, for the purpose of scoring, counts as both colours. These koi also have either babies or dragonflies on them, which factor in two other scoring methods.
The feature tiles are where the majority of your points are coming from. These include:
- Single Flowers – Score 2 points for every adjacent matching colour Koi and a full 12 points if you have all 4 sides.
- Dual Flowers – Score 2 points for every adjacent Koi matching one of the colours and 3 points if the Koi matches both.
- Frogs – 1 point for every dragonfly on an adjacent tile.
- Rocks – 1 point for every baby on an adjacent tile.
- Butterflies – Score 2 points for every Koi of the same colour in the whole row or column.
- Statues – Scores 1/3/6/10 points based on how many adjacent Koi.
- Turtles (yellow-bellied sliders, I might add) – 5 points.
The game is over when there are no more available koi carp to add to the pond, and the highest score wins.
The production quality is good; everything is made of decent-thickness cardboard, and the grid that you lay everything on works well. One thing that is super irritating is that the scoreboard is actually on the reverse of the mat you lay the tiles on, so you have to upend everything at the end of the game to use it to work out the score. There are some fairly nice koi cup meeples that you can use to do this, but, to be honest, as you are not adding up as you go along, this is kind of tedious, and it’s much quicker just to use a calculator, which we ended up doing. Although it wouldn’t really work due to the way multipliers work, definitely adding up as you went along would have been a little bit more engaging. The power package comes in a nice box, and the artwork is really nice and pretty.
Jack and I both really like tile-laying games, and this is similar to Lost Seas that we played at the UKBGE (that I now own and am hoping to get in this Summer… still have a long way to go to hit this year’s goal of 50 games :)).
We both really enjoyed playing this, and I would definitely play again if offered, but I think there are definitely more engaging and thought-provoking tile-laying games out there. Most of the points scoring is simply based on what your stuff is next to, and I would like to have seen more variety in the waypoints were earned. Equally, and I know I probably am being a little bit unreasonable here, adding all of the points up at the end was genuinely quite hard work when an average score seems to get into high double digits, and you’re adding up in threes and fives as you go. Even now, I cannot say with absolute certainty that neither of us missed any scoring tiles when we added up.
While I would sorta recommend “Kōhaku” if you manage to get it on sale, it’s actually quite expensive for what it is, with the cheapest current price being just over £30, and the aforementioned “Lost Seas” is half the price and probably a better game.
