Our review

Industrial revolution in japan

Nippon

The History of Zaibatsu

Quite a few years now, What's Your Game? Is very high up on my watch list as a publisher of extremely high-quality, challenging strategy games. 2015 the company presented us with two new games at the same time, one of them is called Nippon and, to preempt the conclusion, it lines up seamlessly into the range of the games published by What’s Your Game? so far, especially since the Portuguese designer duo Paolo Soledade and Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro, who did publish a game with What’s your game already, Madeira, is also responsible for Nippon.

We find ourselves at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Japan, in the Meiji era. The Japanese market is dominated by imports from Europe and America, but the Emperor has ambitions to change this and to close the gap between Japan and the western world with the help of Japan’s own corporations, the Zaibatsu.

Each player heads one of those Zaibatsu and try to position this corporation at the end as the most powerful and most influential.

The game is played in turns. In your turn you have two options: You can either do an action or consolidate.

There are nine different actions that allow us to advance the development of our Zaibutsu, be it with research, construction of new factories or other infrastructures, production of commodities and placing them into the market to export them.

So far so familiar and standard, but new is that you have to take a worker off the worker area assigned to the respective action area in order to do an actions. Those workers have one of six different colors. You can make your own choice of which worker to remove, but your selection is limited by the workers available in the worker area.

This removing of workers has two consequences for the gameplay:

On the one hand it is more advantageous to collect as few colors as possible, because workers must be paid by color. If you consolidate you must pay 3000 Yen for each worker color. If you have five workers of one color, you pay 3000 Yen, if you have five workers in three colors, you will pay 9000 Yen.

On the other hand the game is propelled by the worker areas. Because when one worker area is empty it is replenished immediately, so that all action options are available all the time, but after a given number of empty areas in relation to the number of players intermediate scorings and also the end of the game are triggered.

Thus Nippon has no classic game rounds, the timing of the scorings and the total duration of the game are governed by players. As the timing of the scorings can decide the outcome of the game, those timings are a tactical element that must not be underestimated.

If you consolidate, you must first discard all your remaining resources – money and coal – and then you receive new income – money and coal in relation to the current development level of your Zaibatsu – and must pay for your workers and then discard the workers. If you have collected at least three workers, you receive a multiplier tile. Those multiplier tiles are important for the final scoring, but also usually give a small instant bonus.

And how does Nippon play?

Nippon is basically a strategic game, you can and should specialize in only a few segments where you develop your Zaibatsu. In which segment you then develop your cooperation in the end is not a deciding element, because there are more than enough options to compensate for underdeveloped weaknesses with once-only bonuses.

Money and coal are scarce, as most action options cost money and the important production of commodities costs you coal, so that, ideally, actions should be planned ahead at least to the next consolidation. Available workers are a factor in those considerations, too, because, first of all the various worker colors cause money to be even more scarce and, then workers trigger scorings. Those scorings are absolutely the deciding element in the game, too. You want to deliver to the Japanese market shortly before a scoring, because this market is scored with a majority mechanism. But as the moment when a scoring is triggered is not always obvious this can cause the best planning to be obsolete.  

In connection with those facts you should always pay attention to the actions of your fellow players. Because with the choice of actions and with the choice of workers you not only influence your own game, but also that of your fellow players, both positively and negatively.

According to my experience it is not the strategic component, which is undoubtedly present in Nippon, that decides winning or losing at the end of the game, the deciding elements are the tactical and interactive ones.

An explicit compliment is due for the components, the graphic design and the rules of Nippon, all of which are old What's Your Game? Virtues, but need to be mentioned!

Markus Wawra

Players: 2-4

Age: 12+

Time: 90+

Designer: Paolo Soledade, Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro

Artist: Mariano Iannelli

Price: ca. 42 Euro

Publisher: What's Your Game? 2015

Web: www.asmodee.de

Genre: Development, majorities

Users: For experts

Version: de

Rules: de en fr it pl

In-game text: no

Comments:

Excellent rules

Very interactive

Lots of options

Good, beautiful components

Compares to:

Madeira, Vinhos

Other editions:

Ghenos Games (it), Hobbity.eu (pl), What’s Your Game? (en, fr)

My rating: 6

Markus Wawra:

Nippon is a very beautiful, complex strategy game. Mechanisms are not world-shakingly new, but refreshingly different, nicely assembled and balanced. I always have many options, tactically and strategically, and must consider many elements for my decisions. Sounds exactly like my game. And yet I do not award the full score of points, because for me the strategic component is not big enough. Win or lose is rather decided by the flow of the gameplay and that sometimes comes across as random. But do not misunderstand me – I would recommend to try Nippon at least once to every fan of complex strategy games.

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 1

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0