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Extraire du minerai, de l’or, déforester et polluer ? Ou vivre en harmonie avec la nature et tout faire pour accueillir les chauves-souris pour profiter de leur guano et ainsi reforester ? The perfect balance between flying foxes (another common name for fruit bats) and the growth of the farm is the key to success and thus victory in this classic worker placement game! You see, Atiwa is a game about bats. I mean, if you want to be pedantic, it’s about developing a small community in the Atiwa Range area of Ghana. But really it’s about bats. Loads and loads of outrageously cute bat meeples. I’m a little bit in love with the bats. As I mentioned above, Atiwa isn’t anything as like as heavy as A Feast For Odin, and while it’s lighter than Hallertau, there are plenty of familial traits passed down through its genes. In the game, you develop a small community near the Atiwa Range, where you creat housing for new families and share recently gained knowledge on the negative effects of mining! Not only this, but the importance that the fruit bats have for the environment. You must acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and make your community prosper. The player who best balances the needs of their community and the environment wins. Preparation: Discard any unselected Terrain cards and draw new ones to replace them. Then shift the Action tile to the right of the empty spot on the Action board one space to the left. Then the next round begins with whoever currently holds the Start Player marker (which shifts via the acquisition of Location cards). End of the Game
Atiwa won’t be a game for everybody; Lookout has slotted this into their "Advanced" range for a reason. It’s a bit mathy. It’s mostly heads-down, min-maxing gameplay where you’re concentrating on your own little world… and it might be analysis-paralysis hell for some players. Player interaction is present, but is relatively gentle; major disruption of your plans by an opponent can happen, but it’s a rarity rather than the norm (maybe a couple of times a game?). However, if you DO like this sort of game, the puzzle presented by those personal supply boards can be an absolute delight to chew over, and all of the game mechanisms live and breathe the setting. Atiwa doesn’t feel like a case of somebody taking a pre-designed game, and then eco-washing it with nice art and a trendy environmentalist theming. Everything fits. Everything makes mechanical sense. It’s an interesting setting for a board game, and you very much feel like the designer is telling the story that he set out to tell. If it isn’t obvious by now, I value a well-integrated theme more than clever mechanisms in my Euro games. In many Euros, theme can be an afterthought, added on during development to explain all the gears and levers the game is made up of. Not here. The designer wants you to know how important this theme is to him. So much so that the game includes a booklet about the Atiwa region including its history, geography, and people. I highly recommend players read this before playing. It also talks about the book that Mr. Rosenburg is writing about the Atiwa region and people, published in German only. Duolingo here I come! Players have a lot of choices but never enough workers. Final Thoughts: I honestly can’t think of even a single negative thing to say about Atiwa. The game play is top notch and the components are excellent. They even gave me plenty of plastic bags inside the box, so I can’t even grouse about that. It’s just an all around fantastic game. In fact, I think that out of all of the new games I’ve experienced over this past year, it’s probably my favorite one.Repeat this procedure for 7 rounds. At the end of the game, you score your area (using the included scoring pad to tally): ATIWA, the new game by successful author Uwe Rosenberg, takes us to a farm in Ghana in West Africa. The Atiwa Range is a region of southeastern Ghana in Africa, consisting of steep-sided hills with rather flat summits. A large portion of the range comprises an evergreen forest reserve, which is home to many an endangered species. However, logging and hunting for bushmeat as well as mining for gold and bauxite are putting the reserve under a lot of pressure.
Atiwa is played over seven rounds, with each round consisting of a work phase in which players will take three actions, followed by a maintenance phase. To set up the game, place the main action board on the table, putting terrain cards above the board and location cards below the board. The action tiles are shuffled and placed on the board as well. Put the appropriate board extension on the right based on the player count. Place all the pollution tokens in the bag. On the surface Atiwa looks like a big complex euro. It has “Advanced Level” written on the box. There are a decent amount of components, however, I personally find it more mid-weight in complexity. Sure, there are a decent amount of rules and a seven step income phase but after a few games it flows very well and is relatively easy to teach and play. What To Do, When?
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This circle of life—trees grow fruit which the bats eat, man cuts down trees to make room to live, bats excrete seeds to grow more trees which begets more fruit which begets more bats—is central to the theme and mechanics in Atiwa*. Each player begins the game with a small village populated with just a few people. Over the course of the game, players will begin growing their village, family by family, bat by bat, in an effort to expand their holdings and score more victory points than their opponents.
Guano, for those not in the gua- know, is the accumulated fecal excrement of birds or bats. High in nitrogen, potassium, and phosphate content, it’s prized the world over as a fertilizer. It was also once highly coveted for its use in the production of gunpowder. However, with the introduction of modern day smokeless powders, gunpowder’s use (and, by default, guano’s usage therein) has sharply declined. Each player takes an action, then play passes to the next player. This process continues until each player has had 3 worker placements. Then there is a bit of maintenance. Any resources gained from your Supply board will always be placed into your tableau, but there are some very specific placement rules. For starters, Family tokens must always be placed into empty huts, untrained side up. So, if you don’t have any empty huts, you cannot gain anymore Family tokens. That’s the easy one. Each player gets a supply board and fills it with their trees, fruit, families, animals and goats. The night card starts empty and stays nearby. Players also get a Village card and place it under their board, and this card is seeded with a family token. You can have an unlimited number of rows under your board, but no more than 4 cards in any row. The three workers (meeples) in their color are placed near the board, and the three player aid cards should be kept nearby.
And that all sounds grand – especially the prodigious pooping! But there’s always a trade-off. With limited space, the bats can’t have it all. You’ve got to factor in the needs of your people. It’s no use having lots of fruit bats but no village to house them. So you’ll be focussed on offsetting the negative effects of mining and bushmeat hunting by creating a bat boom whilst, of course, simultaneously enabling your newly founded settlement to thrive. Zeitgeist, entre fabrication locale, éco-conception et thématiques écologiques, avec Atiwa, et d’autres, on sent que la catastrophe climatique, et environnementale, saisit de plus en plus le marché du jeu de société. Atiwa is played over a total of seven rounds. At the beginning of the game, all the Action tiles will be in their rightmost positions. But, at the beginning of subsequent rounds, the leftmost one will move one space to the left. This has the effect of changing up the available actions from one round to the next. Each Action tile represents a single action of a two action structure: the action shown on the tile and the pre-printed action that is visible just beneath it. There are other stand alone actions dotted all over the board aside from the ones coupled to the Action tiles. Just like that mayor, in this game, you will develop a small community near the Atiwa Range, creating housing for new families and sharing your newly gained knowledge on the negative effects of mining and the importance that the fruit bats have for the environment. Acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and make your community prosper. The player who best balances the needs of their community and the environment wins. But even that’s not cut and dried. Anytime someone adds to their tableau, they get to take the Start Player marker from its current owner. So, do you add to your tableau right now (maybe you need space to place a Goat, for instance) and risk having the Start Player marker taken away from you? Or do you hold out for as long as you can before adding to your tableau? If you wait until your third worker, you’ll be missing out on the opportunity to take that Goat. So, is getting your hands on the Start Player marker worth giving up that Goat over?
The game is played over 7 rounds, and in each round, players will get three chances to place a workers and take the associated action. Possible actions include: In the game, you'll develop a small community near the Atiwa Mountain Range, creating homes for new families and sharing your new knowledge about the negative effects of mining and the importance of fruit bats to the environment. You must acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and grow your community. The player who finds the best balance between the needs of their community and the environment wins. Theme(s) When the game ends, players will add their points and then subtract any negatives they may have received from not feeding their families to obtain their final total. The player with the highest total wins. These points come from a variety of places: one point for each leftover gold; each tableau card is worth points; the rightmost uncovered spot of each Supply board row is worth the number of points printed on it; trained Families are worth a point each, and every Fruit bat in excess of ten is worth a point. Ties are broken by whoever has the least pollution. This player will earn 27 points (1+3+2+15+6) from their Player board. It’s not often a board game makes me want to learn German, read a book about its theme, and wish more games had bat meeples, but Atiwa, Uwe Rosenburg’s newest big box game, does just that. Atiwa is a worker placement game for 1-4 players that will take 60-90 minutes per play. Gameplay Overview: The shifting tiles add variability by covering up placement spots, but also revealing new ones.Everyone has that same goal; but interestingly, there isn’t as much direct competition as you’d expect. Each player has their own ecosystem of animals, trees, families and fruit – as well as their own cards for placing those things. Sure, you compete somewhat for the actions; but there are a lot of action choices available to the players, and there is no competition nor interference once things make it to your little world. Players must then feed their families based on the difference between the number of goats removed from their supply board and the number displayed on the family row. Goats, wild animals, fruit and gold can be used for food.
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