Atiwa

Product Information

The perfect balance between flying foxes (another common name for fruit bats) and the growth of the farm is the key to success and thus victory in this classic worker placement game! Atiwa est du « pur Rosenberg ». On y retrouve tous ses « poncifs », sa patte : placement d’ouvriers pour obtenir telle ou telle ressource (arbre, fruit, or, villageois, nouveaux terrains, chauve-souris), et « couteau sous la gorge » pour nourrir sa population, ses ouvriers. Jusqu’ici, rien de bien neuf sous le soleil.

Everyone has that same goal; but interestingly, there isn’t as much direct competition as you’d expect. Each player has their own ecosystem of animals, trees, families and fruit – as well as their own cards for placing those things. Sure, you compete somewhat for the actions; but there are a lot of action choices available to the players, and there is no competition nor interference once things make it to your little world. Wild Animals, Trees, and Fruit: Take a look at your Supply board and gain the rightmost uncovered reward from each row, starting with the top row and moving down. Wild Animals get you trees. Trees get you fruit. Fruit gets you bats. Each round also has a breeding phase which is good to try and make the best of with you needing a certain token requirement to get 1 more. Combining this with your supply board income is really essential to doing well compared to the other players as these are acting as ’free’ actions to get more tokens off your board and get your economy and engine going. There have been some runaway leader problems in this game when people haven’t put out enough families in the game and start to fall behind in terms of gold income or taking enough terrain cards to make sure they can collect their income and not waste it. The games replayability is ok with each games terrain cards providing a new puzzle to work with but you are essentially doing the same actions each game with the same supply board. I think the game would benefit from an expansion down the line just to bring some new elements to the game or it may become a little repetitive after 10 or so plays. The game ends after 7 rounds so is easy to see coming and plan ahead for. Set in a unique region of Ghana, Atiwa challenges players to manage a player board full of resources and build up their personal play area with new location and terrain cards to store these resources. At first glance, Atiwa’s main board will remind players of an earlier Rosenburg game, A Feast for Odin, with its myriad of worker placement spots. It can be overwhelming at first, but the choices here are simpler, much to the game’s credit. For a bit of variability, 6 of the worker placement spots are randomized at the start using tiles, which also slide to the left each round to cover up old spots and open up new ones.

Another aspect that I enjoy is Atiwa is your supply board. You have your own personal supply board that you remove and add resources to as your progress through the game. Balancing this and managing your resources is very compelling. The more resources you remove the better rewards, but as you spend resources they re-populate your supply board. I love this mechanism and it is so simple. It’s not often a board game makes me want to learn German, read a book about its theme, and wish more games had bat meeples, but Atiwa, Uwe Rosenburg’s newest big box game, does just that. Atiwa is a worker placement game for 1-4 players that will take 60-90 minutes per play. Gameplay Overview: The shifting tiles add variability by covering up placement spots, but also revealing new ones.

Any resources gained from your Supply board will always be placed into your tableau, but there are some very specific placement rules. For starters, Family tokens must always be placed into empty huts, untrained side up. So, if you don’t have any empty huts, you cannot gain anymore Family tokens. That’s the easy one. I’ve not seen an absolute runaway winner yet in quite a few games, which speaks volumes about the level of balance in the game. It’s easy to get complacent about such things, but after Hallertau when some players complained that it was just a case of ‘solving’ the puzzle to move the community centre in the game, it’s great to see another game which feels open-ended. Final thoughts There are several aspects of Atiwa that I really enjoy. The way that action tiles move from round to round is very interesting and can create some tense gameplay moments as you are hoping no one goes to the space you desperately need. There are some static placement spots that don’t change from game to game but some that are variable and I like the variability. There is a decent selection of terrain tiles which are all different and varied adding to the variability. I appreciate both of these things as it will make you change your overall strategy from game to game. Supplies For You In the game, you'll develop a small community near the Atiwa Mountain Range, creating homes for new families and sharing your new knowledge about the negative effects of mining and the importance of fruit bats to the environment. You must acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and grow your community. The player who finds the best balance between the needs of their community and the environment wins. Theme(s) Plus, there’s a thing going on around “training” the families who live in your village. (Though “training” seems like a bit of an odd choice of word to me, and I do wonder if it’s just a slightly awkward German->English translation … I kind of like to think of this action as “educating” your villagers instead of "training"). By default, a newly-arrived family in your village will cause pollution, and see bats as a threat to their livelihood. There’s an end-of-round action where your families all earn income … any “untrained” families do this by mining gold and bauxite — a process which causes pollution chits to creep down your tile tableau, putting spaces out of action for the rest of the game … and “untrained” families also don’t like having bats roosting in their home, which deprives you of a handy bat-keeping space. “Trained” families, on the other hand, earn their income in an ecologically-sound, non-polluting way, will happily provide a home for bats, and will also score you bonus points at the end of the game. So you really want to train your villagers, if you can.Extraire du minerai, de l’or, déforester et polluer ? Ou vivre en harmonie avec la nature et tout faire pour accueillir les chauves-souris pour profiter de leur guano et ainsi reforester ? Repeat this procedure for 7 rounds. At the end of the game, you score your area (using the included scoring pad to tally): Players then receive trees, fruit and fruit bats based on the number of resources removed from their supply board. The Atiwa Range is a region of southeastern Ghana in Africa consisting of steep-sided hills with rather flat summits. A large portion of the range comprises an evergreen forest reserve, which is home to many endangered species. However, logging and hunting for bushmeat, as well as mining for gold and bauxite, are putting the reserve under a lot of pressure. Overall, I think Atiwa is a fantastic game. It is high up in my ranks of Uwe games. I think the theme is appealing, the management of your supply board interesting and the solo mode is great.

Atiwa คุณรู้เช่นเดียวกับนายกเทศมนตรีคนนั้นว่าค้างคาวผลไม้ซึ่งครั้งหนึ่งเคยถูกดูหมิ่นและถูกล่าในฐานะหัวขโมยผลไม้ แท้จริงแล้วเป็นสัตว์ที่มีประโยชน์อย่างเหลือเชื่อ พวกมันกระจายเมล็ดพืชไปทั่วพื้นที่ขนาดใหญ่ของประเทศ ซึ่งช่วยปลูกป่าในพื้นที่รกร้างและปรับปรุงการเก็บเกี่ยวในระยะกลาง การตระหนักรู้นี้นำไปสู่ความร่วมมือทางชีวภาพระหว่างค้างคาวกินผลไม้และชาวสวนผลไม้ สัตว์เหล่านี้ถูกเลี้ยงไว้เป็น "สัตว์เลี้ยง" เพื่อเพิ่มขนาดของฟาร์มผลไม้ให้ใหญ่ขึ้นอย่างรวดเร็ว ต้นไม้สูงถูกปล่อยให้เป็นที่พักอาศัย ให้ที่พักพิงแก่พวกมัน แทนที่จะล่าพวกมันเพื่อเอาเนื้อที่ไม่ค่อยจะมีของพวกมัน แต่ถ้าคุณมีค้างคาวกินผลไม้จำนวนมาก คุณก็ต้องการพื้นที่จำนวนมาก... It’ll come as no surprise to you by now that I love Atiwa. I loved it after my first play at Gridcon last year, and that love has only grown. Part of my love is because the components are so adorable, part of it is the ease of play, and part is of how streamlined it is. Solo will take you half an hour, then you can reset in a couple of minutes and go again (steady now!). How many games can you say that about? Time will tell, I’m sure, but as I write this now, Atiwa is my favourite Uwe Rosenberg game, just edging out Nusfjord. I’m sorry my fishy friend, I love you dearly, but these bats are just too much. Atiwa is a wonderful game. And the noise that the new kid is making is a high-pitched squeaking noise. Look at the lovely little bats! In general, the various action spaces will allow you to gain resources, expand your holdings, or upgrade your Families. Aside from gold, any other resources will always come from your Supply Board. Any Terrain or Location card gained must be situated orthogonally adjacent to any already gained card and they can never be placed in such a way that they extend beyond the edges of your Supply board. So, each row may only consist of four cards, but you can have as many rows as you’d like. For the sake of this review, we’ll refer to this collection of Terrain/Location cards as your ‘tableau’. Income – For each trained family token, gain a gold. For each untrained family, draw a pollution token, gaining 0/1/2 gold as shown. Then, place these pollution tokens, going row by row, left to right on the cards; filling in all top middle spaces first, then top right, then second row, and so forth. If there is a token on a space that is filled with pollution, that token is lost. The pollution tokens are never removed, so this represents a permanent loss of space on your cards.Feeding – Look at the bottom two rows on your supply board. Subtract the number from the goat row from the number in the family row. This is your food demand. If this is a positive number, meet the demand by spending: goat=3 food, animal=2 food, fruit/gold=1 food, bats=1 food. If you cannot meet the demand, lose 2VP for each missing food – mark this on the score sheet.