Okay, everybody. Get ready to have your socks rocked.
Last week I was hunting for an early Christmas present that the boyfriend and I could enjoy together.
We’ve been looking for a game to play together that a) doesn’t take a terribly long time to play, b) is very strategic but not so much that it was painful to play, and c) is actually enjoyable with only two players.
We’ve been to the few game shops downtown, which turned out to be great places for D20s and war games but not so much for abstract two-player strategy.
But boy, did I get lucky the other day when I found Kamisado.
I was hunting around on BoardGameGeek (which is a really awesome place to find TONS and tons of board, card, war, strategy, etc. games – games that you won’t find at Target), and I used their really awesome advanced search feature to dig up something that looked like it might fit the criteria I was looking for.
When it showed up in the mail, we couldn’t wait to open it and try it out. And it’s a good thing we didn’t wait very long.
Kamisado is a two-player board game, a member of the genre known as “abstract strategy” – that is, there isn’t really much of a theme or story to the game and it’s not based on dice-rolling or any elements of chance or luck.
Each player controls eight pawns, known in the game as “dragon towers;” each of a player’s pawns is a different color. One team has black dragons on top of their towers, while the other team has gold dragons on top.
(No, the game is not that icy blue shade. I just thought it looked cool.)
The board is made of 64 colored squares – in fact, they are the same colors as the dragon towers. Hmm… coincidence? I think not.
The object of the game is to get one of your dragon towers all the way to the other side of the board. Your towers can move an unlimited number of spaces in any single direction – diagonally forward (to the left or right), or straight forward, but never backward or to the side. Sounds simple, right?
The catch is this:
Whenever your opponent moves one of his pawns to a square, you must look at the color square that he or she moved onto. If it is red, then your next move MUST be with your red pawn. If it is yellow you must move your yellow pawn, etc. So the trick of the game is to control what the other player is going to do next.
And it might still sound simple, but if you were to play a few rounds you would quickly see that there are pretty much an unlimited number of strategies you could do at any given moment. Though it may appear to be a little like chess, be warned – it is not at all like chess. Which is good, if you hate chess, and not necessarily a bad thing if you love it. Things can turn around very, very quickly, and it is hard to predict the outcome of a game.
Complete rules can be found on the game’s homepage that I linked to above.
By the way, if you’re color-blind, the reverse of the game board has another game board which has the same colored squares printed on it and within each of the squares is a different Chinese character to help you tell the difference between yellow and green. How considerate! Hooray for independent game designers!
(And did you know that there are awards given out for the best board game? Kamisado won one!)
If you have a chance to play this game, I would definitely suggest that you do so. It retails for around $35.00 and so far appears to be pretty much infinitely playable – that is, there are tons of available strategies so you’ll never get board – er, bored!
(Ahh, now you get to see the game’s true colors!)
It’s been really interesting to discover that there is a sizeable international community of people who are really interested in board games – you could say that they are board game hobbyists, in the way some people are into model trains. After playing Kamisado, I can understand why they do this. Not only is it entertaining, but you get to build your brain muscles and have good conversation with your fellow players all at once.
And it never hurts to win, either. ;)
Written by Fuzzy | View Comments
