Kohaku from Nasz Księgarnia is a tile game for 2 to 4 players. The medium-sized box contains a small board, tiles, player markers and reference cards. In the Polish version, there is also a small addition in the base in the form of objective cards. The graphics on the components match the theme and, as befits a pond building game, have a blue water background.
Plum to the pond
After preparing the pool of tiles in accordance with the instructions, we place them in face-down piles in a place accessible to everyone. Place the board in the center of the table. There are 12 spaces on it, where fish and decoration tiles are placed alternately, according to the markings. Everyone gets their marker and reference card, and you can start.
On your turn, choose a fish and an ornament that are adjacent to each other vertically or horizontally from the board. Place the tiles in front of you to form a pond. As on the board, two tiles of the same type cannot touch each other sideways, so we create something like a chessboard. However, it must be remembered that the added element must adhere to the previously placed tiles with at least one edge.
Then we check if there are tiles on the two middle places on the board, and if so, we move them to the empty spaces from which we took our fish and ornaments. Then, draw one tile from the piles face down and place it in the center of the board according to the markings. The game ends when the draw pile runs out and we are unable to fill the empty slots. Then we add up the points and choose the winner.
Like a fish in water
Kohaku is a game that pleasantly surprised me. It’s simple, but requires you to think about your moves. It all depends on the location of the appropriate elements, because the tiles contain information on how a given tile will score. Next to flowers, it pays to place fish in the colors of a given plant, with stones, fry feel best, butterflies score points for the indicated colors in entire columns and rows, and turtles deeply respect our efforts and always give 5 points.
My first association after reading the description and rules was Ecosystem , also published by Nasz Księgarnia, both because of the scoring method and the nature theme. In both titles, we must strive for the optimal arrangement of tiles/cards. Kohaku takes a little longer, our play area is not limited, so we can build a pond in any direction and the requirements of individual tiles are easier to meet. Despite this, the authors of both board games suggest that players should be at least 8 years old. However, the rules are so simple that younger children will also be able to do it and learn spatial planning at the same time.
After familiarizing yourself with the basic rules, you can expand the game with an expansion. After standard component setup, each player gets two cards, of which he keeps one. At the end of the game, we discover our hidden goals and score extra points, e.g. for fish of certain colors in the entire pond, tiles without dragonflies or the largest square filled with tiles. Trying to meet the conditions of ornaments and additional cards raises the difficulty of the game a bit, and I’m glad that the publisher decided to put the expansion in one box with the base.
There is also a variant for fans of solo parties. The player’s movements do not change, but the fictional Danny messes up the board a bit. His moves are random and depend on the tiles drawn from the face-down stacks, so he can accidentally take the elements we have chosen earlier. At the end, Danny scores points for the tiles collected based on the difficulty level selected. We compare his result with ours and choose the winner.
Kohaku will work both for family meetings and for players who want to spend a pleasant evening without playing for several hours. Creating your own pond, when you manage to score the maximum number of points from a given tile, is a lot of satisfaction, and by the way, the completed water bodies look really nice.
