Designed by Bruno Cathala, Mark Paquien
Yamatai is a lovely, isolated series of islands that the Queen has recently been interested in – just waiting to be exploited by speculators such as yourself!
In Yamatai, you will sail boats throughout the rivers in a valley. You will wander through this valley, collecting blessings, and building buildings, temples and arches. Building a building requires the player to deliver the appropriate type of boat to the island you want to build it on. Successfully doing so earns you victory points, but the boats you place can be used by your opponents to build as well. Most of your points are earned by placing buildings, but earning blessings is crucial for allowing you to collect advisors, most of which have huge game-changing effects in your favor.
Interesting Mechanic: Turn Order. During each turn, there are five face up randomly selected actions that the player can choose from. Each player grants some resource boats to the player, and may also have some secondary effects. The most important thing, though, is that the actions also have a number on them, which determine the turn order of the following turn (more powerful actions push your next turn later). Savvy players will learn to manipulate this in order to chain turns to be able to make strong moves without fear of interruption by their opponents.
Yamatai is an absolutely gorgeous game that is simple to learn but deep in strategy, and one of the stronger eurogames to have come out in the last couple of years.
(Photo Credit: GamesQuest)
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