Atiwa

Product Information

In the game, you develop a small community near the Atiwa Range, where you creat housing for new families and share recently gained knowledge on the negative effects of mining! Not only this, but the importance that the fruit bats have for the environment. You must acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and make your community prosper. The player who best balances the needs of their community and the environment wins.

Atiwa won’t be a game for everybody; Lookout has slotted this into their "Advanced" range for a reason. It’s a bit mathy. It’s mostly heads-down, min-maxing gameplay where you’re concentrating on your own little world… and it might be analysis-paralysis hell for some players. Player interaction is present, but is relatively gentle; major disruption of your plans by an opponent can happen, but it’s a rarity rather than the norm (maybe a couple of times a game?). However, if you DO like this sort of game, the puzzle presented by those personal supply boards can be an absolute delight to chew over, and all of the game mechanisms live and breathe the setting. Atiwa doesn’t feel like a case of somebody taking a pre-designed game, and then eco-washing it with nice art and a trendy environmentalist theming. Everything fits. Everything makes mechanical sense. It’s an interesting setting for a board game, and you very much feel like the designer is telling the story that he set out to tell. Atiwa is a one to four player worker placement, resource management game, designed by Uwe Rosenberg and published by Lookout Games. Atiwa is a region in southeastern Ghana with steep-sided hills and flat summits. The region consists of evergreen forests and is home to many endangered species. The Mayor of the nearby town of Kibi is giving shelter to fruit bats in his own garden. The Mayor has recognised the importance of these species that sleep during the day and head out at sunset in search of food. These bats excrete the seeds of the consumed fruit and spread them across large areas.The thematic touch of the untrained workers creating pollution for your community is a great addition. It always pains me to pollute my tableau, especially if I have to destroy a resource, or worse, a bat. It makes you think about what you are doing and pushes the theme of working with nature and the fruit bats for the greater good. Going Alone Each player takes an action, then play passes to the next player. This process continues until each player has had 3 worker placements. Then there is a bit of maintenance. 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. Breeding – look at the current round space on the main board where there are 3 icons. If you have at least as many things as shown, gain exactly one more of that type. 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. This circle of life—trees grow fruit which the bats eat, man cuts down trees to make room to live, bats excrete seeds to grow more trees which begets more fruit which begets more bats—is central to the theme and mechanics in Atiwa*. Each player begins the game with a small village populated with just a few people. Over the course of the game, players will begin growing their village, family by family, bat by bat, in an effort to expand their holdings and score more victory points than their opponents. Good to know: A single colony of 150,000 fruit bats (AKA flying foxes) can contribute to the reforestation of 800 ha of forest within a year! And that all sounds grand – especially the prodigious pooping! But there’s always a trade-off. With limited space, the bats can’t have it all. You’ve got to factor in the needs of your people. It’s no use having lots of fruit bats but no village to house them. So you’ll be focussed on offsetting the negative effects of mining and bushmeat hunting by creating a bat boom whilst, of course, simultaneously enabling your newly founded settlement to thrive.Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Kibi, the mayor is causing a stir by giving shelter to a large number of fruit bats in his own garden. This man has recognized the great value the animals have in deforested regions of our planet: Fruit bats sleep during the day and take off at sunset in search of food, looking for suitable fruit trees up to 60 miles away. They excrete the seeds of the consumed fruit, disseminating them across large areas as the fly home: A single colony of 150,000 fruit bats can reforest an area of up to 2,000 acres a year. 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

Per the rules: “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. Kibi ที่อยู่ใกล้เคียง นายกเทศมนตรีกำลังให้ที่พักพิงแก่ค้างคาวผลไม้จำนวนมากในสวนของเขา ชายผู้นี้ตระหนักดีถึงคุณค่าอันยิ่งใหญ่ของสัตว์ต่างๆ ในพื้นที่ป่าที่กำลังลดน้อยถอยลง ค้างคาวกินผลไม้จะนอนหลับในตอนกลางวันและบินออกไปหาอาหารเมื่อพระอาทิตย์ตกดิน มองหาไม้ผลที่เหมาะสมซึ่งอยู่ห่างออกไปถึงหกสิบไมล์ พวกมันขับถ่ายเมล็ดผลไม้ที่บริโภคแล้วกระจายไปทั่วพื้นที่ขนาดใหญ่ระหว่างทางที่บินกลับบ้าน ค้างคาวผลไม้ฝูงเดียวจำนวน 150,000 ตัวสามารถปลูกป่าในพื้นที่ได้ถึงสองพันเอเคอร์ (5 พันไร่)ต่อปี 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. There is nice balance in your engine building. You will generate a tree engine – whether it is from bats pooping out seeds to generate new trees, or maybe having a lot of wild animals in your area which also lead to trees in the income phase – but in the end, you need trees to buy more land cards, especially village cards. Village cards provide spaces to house families, and as I said – this is one of the main ways to score points. Of course, as soon as you add more families to your area, you increase your food demand and you also increase the chance of pollution taking its toll on your cards…

A Round of Play

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. is a huge forest reserve with 17,400 ha of evergreen forest, which is rare even for Ghana. There are also mineral resources here, such as gold, diamonds, white alumina and bauxite. But that is not what this game is about. Players must then feed their families based on the difference between the number of goats removed from their supply board and the number displayed on the family row. Goats, wild animals, fruit and gold can be used for food.