Atiwa

Product Information

Feeding: To feed your Families, first determine the food demand. Subtract the number of the rightmost uncovered Goat from the number of the rightmost uncovered Family to determine the total. Then pay some combination of tokens and/or gold until this total is met. Wild Animals, Fruit, Goats, and Gold can be spent for different amounts. And untrained Families will even consume Fruit bats. You’ll lose two points for each unfed Family. However, in all the games that I have played, I have yet to see this happen. The food value of each item is shown on the Overview card.

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… Lorna– 1 play I thought it was well done, there’s not much to say about the new Rosenberg. It feels like a Rosenberg from the start. I appreciate the change of theme and learning a bit about fruit bats. There are interesting decisions. It’s on the lighter side. The random pull for gold out of the bag feels like it was added to make it family friendly. I’m happy to play and see if I’m wrong but unlike Dale, I don’t think it will supplant my favorite midweight Rosenberg which is Nusfjord. 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. 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. The graphic design and iconography is very well done. As we have played our first few games, the other gamers in my group (who did not read the rules on their own) were able to correctly interpret the icons on the player aids and the cards; this was very nice to see. And speaking of the player aids – though there are 3 cards worth – they pretty much explain everything that you need to know to play – and this really streamlines the experience.

End of the Round

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. 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

Dans Atiwa, vous développez une petite communauté au Ghana, tout en gérant les populations de chauves-souris. Passionnant, pertinent !

About Dale Yu

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 an 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.