The Syndicate

At a men's retreat over the weekend one of the guys brought a game called Tokaido. Anybody heard of it? There were a ton of rules (the rule book was like a small magazine) but by halfway through the game we more or less knew what we were doing. It was neat. It also didn't hurt that I won.

Epignosis wrote:

G-Man wrote:At a men's retreat over the weekend one of the guys brought a game called Tokaido. Anybody heard of it? There were a ton of rules (the rule book was like a small magazine) but by halfway through the game we more or less knew what we were doing. It was neat. It also didn't hurt that I won.

I've seen it at the store and have been tempted to acquire it because it looks neat, but I could gather nothing about the game play or object of the game by looking at the box.

Cliffs Notes version is as follows:

-The point is not to finish first but to finish with the most points. Bonus points are awarded at the end for certain achievements.

-Everybody (up to 5 players) picks two character cards without looking, read the two character descriptions and attributes (how much $ you start with and what your special attributes are), and select one of them for your character in the game.

-Player pieces are drawn out of a hat. Whichever piece is picked last gets to go first.

-You can only move forward along the board and can only move as far as the next hotel/inn (you start at one and move through four more). Nobody can move past the next hotel until all players reach the next hotel. So if someone is slow-poking it, they might get a few extra turns while you're waiting at the hotel doing nothing.

-Which ever piece is currently the closest to the start always moves next.

-When it's your turn, you can move to any space you like up to and including the next hotel, so long as there is room for your piece. If all spaces between you and the hotel are occupied, you must go to the hotel.

-All the spaces between hotels have different functions: a temple you can donate money to, encounters, a gift shop you can buy stuff from, three different panorama pictures you can build, and a hot spring. Just about every space earns you points, though some spaces require you to spend money to get those points. At each hotel, you can buy a meal if you have enough money for it, which gets you points.

-At the end, you count up your points and distribute the bonus points (things like most gift shop items bought, most encounters, most money donated to the temple). Whoever has the most points wins.

Some characters have bonus perks for landing on certain spaces but there's no guarantee you'll get to land on those spaces. You may have to move past a space you get perks for because it's occupied. When I played, my character got a free point and a free piece of gold each time I landed on an encounter space. Because there were five of us playing, I didn't hit any encounter spaces until the second half of the game. That's where the strategy is- where do you want to go now based on where you hope to go next. It took a while for it all to sink in but it would go much smoother the second time through.