Game Review: Kazaam

By W. Eric Martin
June 13, 2009

Designers: Malgorzata Majkowska & Tomasz Z. Majkowski
Publisher: Wolf Fang P.H.
Players: 2-5
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 45-60 minutes
Rules Language: English & Polish
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Seven, four with 2 players and three with 3

Movies with trick endings can be divided into two categories: One being those movies that you look forward to rewatching, such as The Sixth Sense or Donnie Darko, to gain a better understanding of the plot and characters and emotions now that you have the whole story in mind; the other being movies that are all about the trick with little to offer otherwise. I recall nothing more about The Crying Game than the revelation, for example, and have no interest in seeing it again, while I’ve seen the other two movies multiple times.

Kazaam, regrettably, falls into the Crying Game category. While I enjoyed my first several plays, given what I now know about the game and the strategy involved, my innocence has been washed away and I can never again approach the game with clean eyes. I know the trick that lies in wait when the game begins, and if anyone else knows the trick, the luck factor of the tile draws becomes far more important, spoiling the game as a whole. Read on if you’re ready to have the curtain pulled back and the secret revealed…

Build One Body…

Players in Kazaam are alchemists who want to build a homunculus out of nine parts: two ears, two arms, two legs, a tail, a body and a head. The body parts are on tiles, and each player starts the game with a hand of three tiles. On a turn, you take three actions from the following list of five, repeating actions as you like and performing them in any order:

• Draw a tile. Body part tiles are mixed face-down at the start of the game, and your hand limit is six.

• Discard a tile for ingredients. Each tile shows 2-5 ingredients on it, and you can discard a tile to gain those ingredients – putting them in a bank for your own use – as well as one additional ingredient that matches your alchemist’s specialty. That specialty, along with the homunculus that your alchemist favors, is shown on a card that you draw at the start of the game. Six types of ingredients are used in the game.

• Build part of your homunculus. Pay the ingredients shown on a tile in your hand from your personal bank, and you can add the tile to your homunculus. You can add a tile from any homunculus in the game, but you’ll score more points if the part belongs to your homunculus of choice. You can’t add duplicate heads, bodies, etc., but those extra tiles can still be of use, either for ingredients or to replace a part that goes missing, which brings us to…

• Use the special power of a body part. Once you start building your homunculus, you can use its parts for special actions, and to do so you flip the tile face-down on your card. The ear lets you spy at an opponent’s hand, the arm steals a tile at random from an opponent, the leg digs through the stack of discarded tiles and puts one in your hand, the body grants you three ingredients of your choice, the tail lets you flip a face-up tile face-down (either yours or your opponent’s) or discard a face-down tile from play (again, no matter who owns it), and the head lets you cancel the special power of any tile.

• Flip all your face-down tiles face-up. The game ends once someone adds the ninth tile to her homunculus, and points are awarded for each face-up tile, with bonuses for the player who ended the game and for anyone with tiles that match their favored homunculus or anyone whose face-up tiles are all from the same homunculus.

All of the above sounds fine in the abstract, and in my first several games I played as I suspect the designers intended: I weighed which parts to discard or build based on how efficient I could be, focusing on finding parts of my homunculus as the free ingredients I received when discarding a part would help pay for the parts I was “supposed” to acquire. I used the powers of the body parts a few times to look for my tiles in the hands of opponents and try to steal them, to grab specific ingredients, or to dig in the discard pile for a tile I needed. I used the tail a few times, either to smite a piece in my own homunculus to make room for one that matched or to randomly hit an opponent, but I focused on efficient building as the bonus for ending the game seemed large.

My outlook changed in the fifth game when my sole opponent could not find a tail or leg for the life of him. He drew to his hand limit, then slowly cycled tiles out of his hand – stockpiling an enormous amount of ingredients – while fruitlessly searching for a tail or leg. At that moment, the light dawned on me, and I realized that rather than focus on my own building, I could stymie that of my opponent. Once he found a leg, I used the tail’s power to kill it. Without a leg, he couldn’t dig for that tile and was reduced to drawing once again. He made a head to protect future legs, so I used the tail’s power to cut off his head. (Despite the head’s veto power, if you target the head with the tail, the opponent must flip it face-down whether he vetoes the attack or not; with your second and third actions, you flip your tiles face-up, then strike with the tail once again.)

For my opponent, the game dissolved into grinding frustration. His hand was filled with tiles he didn’t need, and he had to waste actions discarding them one at a time for ingredients that he also didn’t need in order to search for tiles that I would kill as soon as he played them. I ended the game soon afterward, not caring which tiles I built as my score was multiples of my opponent’s no matter how disjointed my homunculus.

In a subsequent two-player game, my sole concern was racing to get a tail on the table first, after which I attacked my opponent turn after turn, watching him spend at least four actions to build a head or leg (draw two tiles, discard one for ingredients, build the other) that I could destroy in three. He stockpiled ingredients in order to play multiple tiles at once, but this merely gave me the opportunity to do the same, keeping my advantage in the race to assemble a working homunculus.

The three-player games came prior to this revelation, and while the players in those games used their tails to infrequently slap one another, we didn’t concentrate on destroying a player who seemed to be approaching completion. Now we would, and I can imagine games in which the advantage would roll from one player to another as our homunculi ebbed and flowed in their parts. Either that, or we’d have a weird stand-off in which you wouldn’t want to be the first to use the tail or else the player after you would chop off yours. Perhaps we’d merely have a tail détente, with each of us reluctant to take any body part actions unless we flipped all the tiles face-up to end the turn in order to provide more cushion against attacks – which puts the game right back into the realm of efficiency but now tinged with parranoia.

Perhaps this combination of efficient building and nose-grinding attacks is what the designers intended. Ideally I would play again with four or five players – multiple times even – to see whether my theory pans out, but given the sour reaction of my opponents, who suffered constant attacks that left them unable to gain ground, I have no interest in playing Kazaam again. I’ve seen what can’t be unseen and am ready to move on.

Want to try Kazaam for yourself? Head to BGN’s Games for the Animals page to see whether the game is still available!

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