Game Review: Kamisado

By W. Eric Martin
October 16, 2008

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

Version played: Production copy
Times played: 13

I previewed Peter Burley’s Kamisado in September 2008, but for those who missed that write-up, here’s a 25-word description of the game: Each turn you move your piece that matches the color onto which the opponent moved, trying to move any piece into the opponent’s back row.

That’s the gist of the game, and the first strength of Kamisado is that you can teach it to someone in 30 seconds and start playing immediately. The first downside to Kamisado is that you will probably lose your first few games in less than 30 seconds as well. Looking at the board above, suppose the black player advances the pink tower to the orange square; the gold player then counters by moving straight onto the pink square to set up a strike into the opponent’s home row. Unfortunately, by landing on pink, black can now move the pink tower along the orange diagonal and win. Three moves and done.

This situation may seem silly, an example of completely shoddy play by mental incompetents, but I’ll confess that my opponent and I made such moves repeatedly in our initial games, allowing takebacks of such “obvious” blunders in order to learn how the game works and avoid starting from scratch every sixty seconds. In this way, Kamisado is more like Chess than any other perfect information game that I’ve played in recent years. Each of the games in Kris Burm’s GIPF series, for example, has a multi-step goal, so one mistake doesn’t doom your chances of winning. With Kamisado, when you mess up, you’re finished. Thus, you quickly learn to look both backward and forward with each move you make: where can you advance in the future, and where can your opponent move right now.

Your next discovery might be the need to balance your advances with the opponent’s moves. To win, you need to place a piece in the opponent’s starting row, so the more colored towers that you force the opponent to move, the more openings you create in that back line – but by allowing the opponent to move those towers, you’re giving her the means to assault your back line.

Recognizing this, you start to look for opportunities to pin an opponent’s piece and force it in certain directions, whether to clear a path to the back or to have it land on a color favorable to your goals. Pinning a piece isn’t simple, though, since you don’t have a choice of which pieces to move, only where to move the piece that the opponent tells you to move. As with Chess, you have a cloud of potential moves that would help you enact a particular strategy and as the game progresses you want to find the right stepping points in that cloud to lead to a clear path toward victory.

Look at the pic above, for example. The gold player has just moved the yellow tower – you know this is the most recent move because the black player’s purple tower has not yet moved from the back line – and the yellow and orange towers have pinned in the opponent’s brown tower. When a tower is trapped, if that piece is forced to move, then it takes a null move (staying in the same square) and the other player moves the tower that matches the square on which this tower stands. Thus if the gold player can land a tower on brown, then he’ll be able to scoot his yellow tower into the back line – but no matter which color the black player’s purple tower lands on, gold will be able to either move onto a brown square or win the game immediately.

Only at this point is it clear that black’s move of the brown tower onto yellow was a fatal error, which leads to Kamisado‘s second strength: You can almost feel yourself getting better at the game the more that you play. Once you’ve played the game a few times, you can start to spot dangerous situations and potential traps, whether or not the opponent is aware of them. Multiple times I recognized at the end of a move that I had given my opponent the opportunity to win a few turns later; sometimes he picked up on those opportunities and other times the game continued without him realizing that he had missed out. I didn’t draw his attention to those situations, but I did learn to avoid putting myself into them in future games. At least I think I did – only more games would prove the point.

All of the above talks only of the basic game, the game played in a single round with a player winning once she reaches the opponent’s back row. You can also play a series of games with the winning piece receiving a sumo ring, and players relining up their pieces in the home row and playing again. A sumo piece can move only five spaces and can push a non-sumo piece directly in front of it one space backward, with that player moving again immediately with the piece that matches the color onto which the pushed tower was moved. Create three sumos or land a sumo in the back row, and you’ve won the standard match. In the long match or marathon match, you can create double and triple sumos that move less distance, but push more towers.

Once you enter the standard match, with the pieces no longer starting on the squares that match their color, you start learning the game again. The opening moves of the first game are no longer possible, so you need to study the board afresh. In my half-dozen games with sumos, the pushing aspect hasn’t played a large role, but the restricted movement has. The opponent can put the sumo into play without it reaching the back row, risking a future shove for a current safe move.

Thirteen games in, I feel like I’m just starting to discover how Kamisado works and how to make somewhat clever moves. Moreover, the game is fun, which is its third strength. I like trying to set traps and trick the opponent into making the moves I want her to make. Since she controls half of my actions – specifically the choice of which piece I’m going to move – I need to figure out how to take that advantage away from her through the choices I can make.

While the graphic design of the game is generally good, with nicely-shaped towers that combine with the sumo rings to simultaneously display the current score and the pieces’ potential movement, the box design is lacking as the rings float in a pocket of space above the board and below the lid. Open the box, and the rings will slide all over the place. You can stick the rings between the plastic insert and the box, but then you have to disassemble everything in order to play – a minor irritant in an otherwise thoroughly satisfying design. Burley may not be a prolific designer, but I can imagine Kamisado turning into a classic on par with his Take it Easy! in the years to come, showcasing the value of quality over quantity.

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