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Author: Publisher: 2018 No. of Players:
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G@mebox publisher Frank Schulte-Kulkmann writes about the game:
The Tales of Ki-pataw was a discovery of my wife Nicole at the SPIEL 18 convention. All I knew was that it was about different time travelers visiting a city to fulfil their individual missions, and looking at the artwork Nicole and I were strongly reminded of the anime movie The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.
To point it out right away, the game does not feature any fancy mechanism for time travelling, and indeed a first look at the gameboard with its different places and the actions available at each place may provoke the conclusion that it is a simple game of movement and collection.
However, sometimes there is more to discover than what might be assumed on first sight, and so the problems for the players already start with the way in which they can move their characters. Each character in the game possesses its own individual deck of cards, being made up from Healthy, Cold, Hungry and Mission cards. At the beginning of the game and at the end of each round a player refills his hand of cards to three with cards from his characters deck, trying to use these cards in the most efficient way during his next upcoming turn. The Health, Cold and Hungry cards all can be used to move a player's playing piece, but only the Health cards actually allow for two movement steps, whereas the other two cards only allow for one step each. So, a player actually may wish to remove the slower cards and get more Health cards to move quicker on the gameboard, and he may do so by visiting certain places, for example a restaurant in which a Hungry card can be remove from a player's deck and is replaced with a Healthy card. However, while many places offer possibilities for card replacements, these places often also offer an alternative action. These actions may be the taking of food cards or resource cubes, and all these may be needed by the players to fulfil a Mission card which they may have in their hand, bringing together the required at one specific place on the gameboard in order to solve the mission card. The collecting of two fulfilled Mission cards is part of each player's game goal, along with the individual goal of each of the characters in the game. So, an individual goal may be to gather a full collection of different resource cubes, whereas an other goal may be to visit a certain amount of places and leave a marker there. A player who first fulfills all his goals will have won the game, but an other player actually may share in his victory if he has come upon the playing piece of the winner's character several times during the game. At each of these instances the players the active player may give the other player one of his character tokens to be placed at the other player's character sheet, and the player with most tokens on another player's sheet actually will be that character's ally who will join in case of victory. However, getting rid of a player's character tokens also reveals special power spaces on his own character sheet. If a player spends a resource, he may cover one of his revealed special power symbols with it in order to perform a special action, and these special actions usually are tuned to stand in line with the character. So, the witch is able to teleport etc. Nicole and I were taken by surprise just how much thinking this game requires. It turned out to be a quite interesting race challenge which offers a nice combination of deckbuilding, movement and resource management, and due to the player characters and their abilities there is also a nicely thematic overarching story. |
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Copyright © 2019 Ralf Togler & Frank Schulte-Kulkmann, Essen, Germany |