Game Preview: Kamisado

By W. Eric Martin
September 22, 2008

Publisher: Burley Games
Game page: Kamisado
Designer: Peter Burley
Players: 2
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 15-60 minutes
Release Date: October 2008
Price: €24
Links:

Kamisado is a gloriously colorful two-player abstract game that feels just as colorful during play. Each player controls eight colored towers that start on the backline of an 8x8 grid, which is composed of colored squares that match the colors of the towers. On the first turn, a player moves any tower any number of spaces either straight ahead or diagonally forward. Whichever color space he stops on determines which piece the opponent must move; similarly, the opponent’s move will determine which color piece you’ll move. Pieces can’t move sideways or backwards, so they’re constantly advancing toward the other player’s starting line. Land one of your pieces in that row, and you win.

Well, that’s one way to play: a short game that will last about 15 minutes, with the time possibly creeping upwards as you become more skilled at the look-ahead. Designer Peter Burley also has a point system for the game that introduces sumo rings. When an empty piece lands on the back row, it’s awarded a ring (worth one point). You then refill the back row of the board, with the loser deciding whether pieces on the board fill the back rows to the left or the right, guaranteeing diverse set-ups and openings. In future games, a piece with a sumo ring that starts its turn vertically adjacent to an opponent’s non-sumo piece can push it backward one space instead of its normal move; this push counts as the opponent’s turn, and you move again immediately, using the colored piece that matches the space onto which the pushed piece landed.

A series of matches can be played until someone scores 3 points (which equals the creation of three sumos or the landing of a sumo in the back row), 7 points (which is the score for landing a double-sumo in the back row), or even 15 points – although Burley says that he hasn’t been crazy enough to try that himself, mentioning that a match of 7 points typically takes hours to complete.

So That’s Where Designers Get Their Ideas!

Burley says that the design of Kamisado dates to the late 1970s and a chance observation in a men’s room. “I noticed that the floor had an interesting pattern of small colored tiles,” he says. “I mentally made a note that this could possibly be used as a basis for a board game – this is something that I do quite a lot, whenever I see something a bit different. It must have made a deep impression on this occasion, however, because that night I had a vivid dream involving this tile pattern, and somehow the notion of ‘whatever colour you land on, your opponent must move a piece that matches this.’ I guess my subconcious mind had been working on this and sorted it out while I was asleep.”

He created the initial game design the following morning, laying out colors in different arrays to be both symmetrical and not repeat colors in rows and columns. “A bit Sudoku-ish, I suppose,” he says, “but a long time before Sudoku was around.”

While his initial 6x6 board worked, Burley moved up to a larger board to give the game play more scope, and although the game consisted of only a single round, people dug into it like a bowl of potato chips. “During the last thirty years, the game in this form has been played (literally) thousands of times by me, my family and friends,” he says. “It has not been ‘broken,’ i.e. no technique has been discovered to allow a player to win every time if moving first.” Along the same lines, a friend wrote a Java program to test the game and that test also came back negative for brokenness.

Kubla Khan and All That

Kamisado acquired its multi-game potential in 2006 in a Coleridgian episode that followed a demonstration of the game – along with the then soon-to-be-released Take it to Limit! – to friends. Says Burley, “They were so enthusiastic that I stayed up long after they had gone and messed around with the starting line-up to see if I could find a way of extending the game into longer formats and exploring the vast potential of the different permutations of the initial tower placements. To my horror, at about 2 o’clock in the morning, I thought I had found a fatal flaw in the basic game, so I worked desperately hard for the next two or three hours to try to combat this. The solution I came up with involved the concept of a Sumo tower, which had the power to escape from a trap by pushing an opponent’s piece out of the way. In the same session, I also came up with the concept of resetting the pieces from the left or from the right, based on the end positions from the previous round. To round it all off, the scoring system based on the sumo rings being placed on the pieces just seemed to come naturally. Magically, in the space of one night, everything seemed to come together and create what was, in effect, a whole new game.”

“The next day,” Burley continues, “after I had managed to get a little bit of sleep, I realized (to my relief this time) that I had been mistaken in believing that I had found a flaw in the basic game, probably due to confusion induced by tiredness. This meant that I now had a much more powerful new product, and what I really liked about it was that the original game could still exist in a totally unchanged format within the ‘umbrella’ of the total concept. I decided then and there that I now had a game that was weighty enough for publication and started off along the (long and difficult) road to conquering all the problems involved in taking Kamisado from a concept to a manufacturable end product.”

After much worry and concern on his part, Burley says the sumo rings came out looking as good as you could hope. “We had lots of problems with getting the coloration right for the dragons and rings,” he says. “The gold plastic just looked like goldish brown, and to spray paint them in gold would have caused a safety risk (if the paint came off), so the ultimate solution was to electroplate the dragons and towers, which looks fantastic, and the electroplating doesn’t come off.”

The board is double-sided, with the only difference being a Chinese character on each of the board spaces. Says Burley, “The Chinese characters do not mean anything during play, except to those (like me) who are color-blind.” Each character names the color of the square. “It doesn’t take long to learn the symbols. Basically, if you’re color-blind, you learn fast and you have to latch onto any clues provided as quickly as possible. And these symbols are a pretty big clue! Having said all that, I really like the look of them, and many people may prefer this side of the board, for aesthetic reasons alone.”

Checking the Competition

Dozens of perfect information strategy games are released on the market each year, but Burley feels that Kamisado stands out because it’s not a Chess variant, yet it features that level of depth. “Each time you play the game, it is totally different,” he says. “There are, for example, about 400 milllion different positions that can be reached after the players have taken only four moves each . Despite this, the game is very easy to learn because all the pieces move in the same way, and the object of the game is simple and clearly defined.”

“It would not be possible to write a book of Kamisado openings as you have for Chess,” says Burley, “because after the first round, the starting positions of the dragon towers is different every time and, by my calculations, there are over one-and-a-half billion different start positions, which doesn’t take into account the fact that some towers can be Sumos or Double Sumos, etc. This rules out any possiblility of anyone studying or defining set openings, which makes Kamisado more fun and ‘immediate’ than most two-player strategy games. You can start playing after a 30-second explanation, then start to learn and improve your strategies as you go along.”

If you want pointers off the bat, though, Burley says that the most common mistake players make is to think they’ve won after a couple of moves when they have a straight shot at the opponent’s back row. Notes Burley, “It is vital that players understand the rule that is the main driving force behind the game: You can move a particular dragon tower only if your opponent’s previous move has finished on a square whose color matches the color of this tower. This rule is stressed very strongly in the rules handbook and it is vital that players understand it. Once you do understand it, there is not much else (in terms of rules) to learn.”

Aside from that, keep watch that you don’t block your own pieces or otherwise restrict their movement because your opponent will then have a better idea of which moves are possible for you. Says Burley, “Your opponents will be trying their best to do this to you, so there’s no need to help them by doing it yourself!”

To preorder Kamisado, write to Peter Burley with your request and vitals or visit Kamisado.com.

First impression, by W. Eric Martin

Version played: Prototype
Times played: Once, with two players

As with many well-designed perfect strategy games, such as Kris Burm’s TZAAR or YINSH, Kamisado takes only a minute or two to learn. The colors on the gameboard are dazzling in their brightness, but they suck you into the game play almost immediately. Anyone passing by this game is bound to take a look, if only to satisfy their curiosity.

The prototype on display at Spiel 06

Your potential moves are effectively laid out on the board, as if you’re a child with marked chess pieces once again, and all you have to do is spot the one which will work best. Sounds simple, but the design feels rich and open, especially once you get into later rounds and alter the starting set-up.

When you acquire a sumo ring, you slide the proper-sized ring over the top of the piece, letting it rest on one of the protruding levels – a clever bit of graphic design that the methodical Burley puts into all of his releases.

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