Hakoniwa Kings

Beautiful building battles for a great warm up

Best for: Those who need a quick game to start the night off, or to teach several mechanic ideas to newer gamers

3 - 4 players

15+ minutes

22/02/2021

This game did incredibly well at the Fall Tokyo Game Market in 2020--I heard it actually sold out in an hour! I'd finally found their booth only to be greeted with a sign that said they were taking online reservations for a new print run. On top of the art that had already captured my heart (if you know me and my blogs, you know I love a good art style), the fact that it had sold so fast told me I HAD to have this one.

Also, just as a side note the name is adorable. Hakoniwa means mini garden, but the hako part is also "box", so I have this image of little monarchs in wee box gardens in my head. Naww ^.^

When it finally arrived a few weeks ago I was ecstatic! It took a little while before I could play it, as it's a 3-4 player one, but I finally managed it and I have some THOUGHTS. Stay with me, because although I really like the game over all, I think it needs to be used very specifically and in the proper timing to be a hit with the group.

So how does it play?

It has a good few things going on for such a small card game, but the premise is that you use the cards in your hand to gain resource points, use them and other cards to level up buildings until they're built, and eventually win by either having 15 resource points or 3 (out of 4) buildings built.

So already you can see that there's a need to choose a victory path and balance your spending appropriately.

The 6 cards in your starting hand are from a draft at the beginning, and if you want more from the deck you can use card effects to get them. There's a lot of choices to make in this game!

Each round is encapsulated in a season, which is split into 4 phases. The phases are the season phase, the build phase, the action phase, and the end phase. The interesting thing here is that instead of each player doing all 4 phases then passing the turn, each player does their phase actions in turn, and then when everyone has finished doing their end phase, the season changes.

For example, it starts with my season phase, then Mitch's, then Erin's, and then I does my building phase. (I have some notes on this later, but let's keep talking rules for now.)

The seasons themselves are little more than an extra effect per round during the season phase, but it's a very pretty way to incorporate it; each season on the board has an effect, like gain resource points or draw a card.

Next, everyone does building stuff; buildings that are level 2 or more (out of 5) get an extra level. Then, if you like you can spend a resource point to increase another building level. We actually played this two different ways, as we weren't entirely sure if the optional point spending could only be done if you had a building that was 2 or more, but we discovered it only made sense if you could do the optional spending without the level 2 or higher condition.

The action phase then presents several options: You can play a card from your hand, not play a card and gain a resource point, OR rely on the deck deities and draw a card to activate on the spot. I liked this flexibility, it lent a touch of excitement to the phase.

Lastly, if someone has 15 resource points at this point, or 3 buildings built, they win!

It's not a simple race to one of the conditions though, as a great number of the cards take points from others or damage buildings so the owner has to rebuild them. In that sense, there's a lot of take-that feeling about it.

So how did I feel about the game?

Mixed. I think it has an incredible amount of potential with some tweaks. The sheer amount of balance mechanics and speedy cards make it a snappy way to warm up the game night or get a newer player up to speed on some things to keep in mind, but the game suffers from a few things that mean I can't play it again and again.

Firstly, and this is the biggest one, it's much easier to win (at least with 3 players) by getting resource points. Buildings have a great advantage with their area effects, but they get de-levelled very quickly and their effects disappear with them.

In the same vein, the cards that damage buildings and steal points feel a little less like strategic or satisfying poaching, and more just like a slap in the face. Sort of like a burn deck in Yu Gi Oh. Just feels a bit rubbish to have your points taken for no reason other than luck of the draw.

There also seems, to me at least, an optimal order in which to build the buildings. Start with the points defence, then go for point scraping, then double card use, then bonus points. Given that the buildings and cards all seem to have a theme and weave into each other well, we actually thought the game might work well if each player has a different starting deck, giving them an advantage in one building type to work from there. We've made the decks already, but covid times means a third player isn't easy to wrangle, of course.

Another thing this pretty little box could benefit from is a phase tracker. It sounds nit-picky, but we all constantly confused who was doing what in which phase and when. In the end, we went with using the wooden season token at the top, middle, and bottom of each season to show the phases. That worked quite well. Small lines to create phase boxes would be brilliant, or a separate phase tracker, just because the system there is a bit unique.

Overall, I feel like this has the potential to be a fantastic strategy game to take with you when you want a beautiful and snappy game, but it needs to be tweaked for balance before that happens. The good news is, that I will definitely buy another copy if a version 2 comes out with updated cards, or an expansion!

Language dependency: ●●●●●

Learning the rules: ●○○○○

Price: 2000 JPY

Overall rating: 2.5/5

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