Sport Assessment: TOKAN, or One Toke’s Not Sufficient to Rating | BoardGameGeek Information

In sport overviews, I typically prize “easy guidelines” as a optimistic attribute, however I’ve hardly ever gone additional than that phrase.

What constitutes “easy guidelines”? A ruleset you can clarify inside x seconds? That matches inside a sure paper dimension? I have a tendency to think about easy guidelines as not having exceptions from a core of potential strikes. A sport might need exceptions, sure, however the exceptions as successfully outdoors of the foundations themselves. In Innovation, for instance, every motion you’re taking is considered one of 4 prospects:

• Draw
• Obtain
• Meld
• Dogma

Innovation‘s rule construction is formalized and minimal, however the sport consists of 105 playing cards, every with a singular potential, and people skills come to life with every dogma. Your (fundamental) motion transforms into one thing else courtesy of a card in play.

Steffen Mühlhäuser‘s TOKAN from Steffen Spiele works in another way in that its rule set is (virtually) a single sentence. After establishing the thirty tokens in a random 5×6 grid, gamers select a coloration (pink or black), then alternate turns, and on a flip:

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If potential, you progress considered one of your coloured tokens orthogonally — with a mouse transferring precisely one house, a jackal two, and a lion three — in order that it finally ends up at a better stage than it began, with a jackal having the ability to carry one tile when it strikes and a lion carrying as much as two tiles.

We should add three wrinkles to this minimalist rule set, the primary being a proof of the way you win after nobody can transfer and the sport ends:

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After discarding all single-token stacks, your rating is the same as the sum of tokens in stacks which have your coloration on high.

The second wrinkle is a tad extra sophisticated:

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While you transfer a token, if a number of tokens are “behind” the transferring token, then you definately slide these tokens to fill the hole left behind.

The ultimate wrinkle:

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Tokens can’t transfer over gaps.

The black lion within the higher proper can land solely by itself lion, which is not essentially unhealthy

Every little thing derives from these guidelines…aside from one exception that I incessantly neglect throughout play:

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You may’t cowl the token that the opponent moved on the earlier flip.

This restriction, as small as it’s, appears like a cowlick on an in any other case well-styled mannequin. My reminiscence is not nice, and typically I’ll actually neglect which token the opponent simply moved as I buzz by way of potential strikes on my flip in my head. We might rotate a token 45º to mark it as off-limits, however then we would must unrotate a token and rotate a brand new token every flip, and up to now we have not seen something breaking from us not utilizing this rule. We play with the idea that any token is truthful sport for being stacked upon, and all is ok.

The moved mouse has dragged two tiles with it

Effectively, form of advantageous. I’ve performed 5 instances on a replica from the BGG Retailer — sure, we now have copies on the market — and up to now I’ve received just one sport, being routed within the different 4.

TOKAN stays a thriller to me at this level; I discover myself unable to simply image which tokens are transferring the place, which responses the opponent might must a transfer. Like Kris Burm‘s DVONN, the board begins with a plethora of potential strikes. Every token can transfer virtually anyplace! A lot freedom!

Then tokens and stacks begin getting minimize off. A token can have just one transfer potential, and what potential does it have after that? One facet of the sport that I believe I undervalue is the power to hold — or not carry — a token or two with a jackal or lion. You may all the time have a look at the tokens in a stack, so earlier than transferring a carnivore, you may assessment what it might carry and what could be left behind.

And now the lion is kaput for actual

Leaping by yourself token provides you one thing to hold so to finish the transfer at a better stage — and typically you might be compelled to hold one thing so to make a authorized transfer — however you may typically transfer whereas uncovering a token of yours beforehand hidden, successfully getting two assaults from the identical house.

I do know this intellectually, but I have never been capable of play nicely with this in thoughts. No lions have sprung from the bush unexpectedly to swallow my opponent’s stacks.

As with different video games of this sort, I really feel like I will be taught TASSO greatest by enjoying a number of instances, recognizing errors alongside the best way and seeing find out how to arrange future strikes, however up to now I am nonetheless on the horizontal a part of the talent curve. We’ll see whether or not that adjustments with time.

For extra examples of gameplay from begin to end, watch this video: