Family celebration – review of the game “Kokopelli”

In each village, the inhabitants perform ceremonies. The more of them and the more varied they are, the better. Make your settlement win! Is the Indian idol Kokopella on your side?

Stefan Feld is a designer popular with gamers who has won the hearts of Euro games fans in particular. I also belong to this group, and my favorite titles by this author are Castles of Burgundy and Trajan , both published 10 years ago. These are suggestions for slightly more advanced people. However, Feld does not stop creating, and this year he chose the family card game Kokopelli .

Preparation for the celebration

First, draw 10 of the 16 available tiles at random and return the rest to the box. The ones that remain in the game are placed in a row in the middle of the table and two chips with 3 and 4 points are placed on each of them. They then all receive villages and build their own decks. From your set (on the back there are players’ colors), throw away those cards that represent the ceremonies put aside at the beginning, i.e. the above-mentioned 6 tiles.

We also put the scoring and game ending tokens in a place that is accessible to everyone. Each person draws five cards from their deck, and the first player receives a token. You can start the game.

Let the fires light

You must make two moves on your turn. We can choose from five available actions: drawing a card, starting the ceremony, showing the card, stopping the ceremony and exchanging cards. We can have a maximum of five cards in our hand, and the excess should be set aside.

How do we perform ceremonies? Collecting sets. We can place cards at four fires in our village and at our two closest neighbors on both sides. We start the rite only at home, but we can also add cards of the same type to our teammates’ villages. If someone places the fourth card in the column, the ceremony is complete. The finisher takes the token with the higher score from the tile in the middle of the table and places the cards on the discard pile.

If the cards we have chosen do not suit us, we can also replace them and take new ones, while failed or unnecessary ceremonies can be interrupted by removing them from the village and creating a place for another one.

The game continues until someone runs out of draw deck or until all end game tokens have been used. Then we count the points and choose the victorious village.

Family idol

Kokopelli is the easiest game by Stefan Feld that I have had the opportunity to play. Maybe that’s why I didn’t like it as much as my teammates. However, this does not mean that it is not a good title. It’s just that from this author I expected more mechanics and more complicated gameplay. Despite this, I enjoyed the game quite nicely.

The Polish language version has been limited only to player instructions and help cards. This is where you will find descriptions of the individual benefits of having a ceremony in your city. This information is on the cards, unfortunately, in English. This is not a big problem because there are also icons at the top, but the full Polish version is a bit missing. The previously reviewed titles of this release – Roundforest and Lupos – also had several manuals in different languages, but no text on the components. It is different here and for people who do not know English, constantly checking the stocks can be a bit irritating. The graphics did not impress me either. They are probably supposed to reflect the character of Indian paintings and that’s what I really associate with it.

Laying out the same cards in columns seems boring, but each ceremony gives us new opportunities. If there is a Dobosz in our village, we can finish the rituals after the third card. Fire allows you to start ceremonies also in other villages, and the Hunter allows you to draw a card from the pile. There are as many as 16 variables regarding the scoring or laying of cards, of which only 10 enter the game, so their arrangement will be slightly different in subsequent games. This has a positive effect on the replayability of this title and allows you to discover better and worse combinations of individual activities.

During the game, we want to complete the ceremonies, but also have some permanently in the village because of their useful skills. On the one hand, we block our place, because we only have four fires, but on the other hand, we gain profits, e.g. additional points for closing rituals or for adding cards to teammates’ villages. Playing to adjacent settlements introduces a negative interaction. Others, like us, want to have certain ceremonies due to their skill, so if we end one that was attractive to our opponent, we will not only score points from the tile in the center of the table, but also deprive someone of the benefit.

There is randomness in the game, because we never know what we’ll be able to match. However, everyone has six jokers in their deck representing the title idol. They can replace any card. Thanks to this, you can control your capricious fate a bit, especially since one of the ceremonies (Snake Dance) treats Kokopelli as two cards at the time of the show.

This year’s game by Stefan Feld is definitely a proposition for less experienced players. It will work as a family title. The younger ones will learn how to exploit the relationship between the various perks of the ceremony, and experience negative interaction, but in a very gentle and non-malignant form. For me, Kokopelli is too simple, especially since I associate the author with many well-interlocking mechanics. However, the target audience should like it.