Customer Reviews

Samurai

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This was the game that first led me to suspect that Reinier Knizia (designer of Samurai and other games) is a genius. I had already played Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride, and I was looking for something else. I chose Samurai almost by chance. After a few plays I was impressed. After a few more plays I thought "this game is amazing"! And now I have 12 Knizia games. In the games of Reinier Knizia, we can see a great mind at work.

Samurai is not a complicated game. It has about the same level of complexity as Settlers or Ticket to Ride. But it has a spark of magic that those more famous games lack in my opinion. The magic of Samurai is in how beautifully and perfectly all the pieces fit together. At the beginning of the game players have lots of options. Every turn, players select and place a tile on the board. Things start of get a little crowded after a while, and players are realizing the consequences of their early tactical choices. By the end players are playing in certain last spaces, hopefully spaces they have planned for in advance.

You can't play too forcefully, or you will spend too much of your resources on one place. The battle is being simultaneously fought all over the board. Players can't afford to leave any area uncontested.

Samurai is beautiful and original to look at. The board itself is a die-cut irregular shape in the form of a map of Japan. The pieces that are contested (rice paddies, buddas and high-helmets) are a lovely black shiny acrylic. The board and bits are VERY satisfying to play with. The artwork is very well rendered by Franz Volwinkel.

This game scales particularly well. With four players, the entire board is used and all bits. With fewer playes only portions of the board are used and fewer bits. With 2 players, or 3 or 4, the game feels exactly the same. It plays quickly and smoothly, in about 45 minutes. My kids like it, and pretty much everyone else that I've introduced it to.

My first introduction to Reiner Knizia's Samurai was actually through a PC game version of it which I believe was shut down due to copyright issues. A shame really as I would have never given this product a try had it not been for that playable demo.

This product comes with 4 fairly heavy duty cardboard island pieces that make up the game board, 4 sets of colored unit cards and 3 sets of markers (Rice, Buddha and high helmets). The included rulebook is made up of a few pages with detailed and quality instruction that make picking this game up simple.

The youngest player starts out by placing 1 of the markers onto an available city, then the next player and so on until all of the markers have been placed.

Now the game begins!

Again the youngest goes first with play continuing clockwise around the table. The player places one or more of his cards on the board trying to surround some of the previously placed markers. Once a city or village has been completely surround on land, the total amount of cards are tallied to determine who wins the marker.

The cards each player can use come from a pool of about 24 and he gets to pick 4 to start with and after each round draws enough randomly to retain 4 in hand.

These come in a variety of forms from Samurai to Boats with some only influencing a given marker. They range in strength of 1 to 4 so the numbers are easy to calculate.

While my description might make it seem overly complex, the game is really simple and after one or two games you'll have the rules down. Mastering it on the other hand...

An excellent game which is worthy of shelf space on any avid board gamer's bookshelf. I only wish the box was a bit smaller.

This is good for small groups (2 to 4). Place your hexagon tiles on the map of Feudal Japan. Your samurai, ronin, navy ship, and piece tiles will influence the surrounding pieces. Once a piece (rice, hat, or Buddha) is completely surrounded, player with the biggest influence gets the piece. Try to diversify your earnings, and plan to influence multiple pieces with one tile whenever possible. The map comes in 4 pieces, and you only use one piece per player (i.e. a 4-player game plays on the full map)

As my title suggests, this may be a perfect game. You can read the description to get a sense of the rules, so I will not go into a detailed explanation. I will just say the game involves the placement of tiles wisely to exert influence on three different types of "statues": buddhas, warriors, and rice paddies. The greatest influence around a city or village containing the statues wins them and your goal is to try to dominate 2 of the 3 types of statues. Here are the reasons why I think the game is perfect:

1) The game time is not overwhelmingly long, hence playing 2 or 3 games back to back is very reasonale. It runs about 30 minutes for 2 players and 4 players is usually under an hour.

2) The game scales wonderfully for 2, 3, and 4 players.

3) The winner is determined mostly by strategy and only slightly by luck. The order of the tokens you draw is luck, but everyone will draw the same tokens, only the order will be different. So you have to adjust your play if you are not getting the strong tokens early, but rest assured, those tokens are coming. There has to be a slight amount of luck in my opinion. Games that have no luck involved almost always have an advantage to the player who goes first and that advantage can be quite difficult or even impossible to overcome depending on the skill of the players. A slight bit of luck is often needed to remove the advantage of going first.

4) The decision making on each turn is very important, but not so burdensome that the game is not fun. Sometimes you will have tokens that allow you to play multiple tokens in one turn. But you always have to keep an eye on balancing your play to win the rewards in a balanced and efficient way. It is just the right amount of thinking involved in my opinion.

5) The board, pieces, and box are all very artfully done.

6) The game is actually fun to play and can get addictive. I have actually heard of people purchasing iphones just so they can play the electronic app version of this game with their friends while on-the-go.

A couple of things I wish that were better.
A) I wish the hexagonal tiless were quality plastic instead of cardboard. They seem to be well made and it appears they will hold up for a long time if care is taken. There might be some clear polyurethane coats you can spray on them to make them last for years and years, but I have not tried that yet.

B) The screens that you use to hide your tokens are attractive, but flimsy. The only purpose they serve is hiding your tiles, so I guess the quality of the blinds doesn't really matter. But it would be nice if they had been made a little thicker.

All in all, this is a wonderful game for "gamers" as well as family. A strategic game with just the right amount of thinking that still promotes fun and interaction.

And just as a side note: I ordered the game from one of the sellers who distributes through Amazon (Robinson's Gamestore which ships out of Pennsylvania). I live three states away, but I received the package THE NEXT DAY, and I did not even use next day service. Obviously, that does not guarantee that YOU would get it the next day. But this is some of the best service I have ever seen. Wow!

This game is fun and awesome! Replay-ability is great, and the game is really flexible since 2-4 people can play.

takes a little while to get the hang of the rules, but once you do it isn't complicated. we enjoy the game

This game is great for anyone who enjoys light strategy. One of the best features is the flexibility to use 2 - 4 players while keeping the balance. The only downside is the complexity of the instruction manual. The game is actually pretty easy to pick up, but the manual makes it seem much more complicated. We gave up trying to learn the game on several occasions, but I'm glad we finally gave it a shot. Now it's one of our favorites.

My partner and I have gotten into some different board games over the last year, a number of them rather complicated and what I would call in the "Settlers of Catan" category: Dominion, Pandemic, Cleopatra, Lost Cities, etc.

I have become singularly obsessed with Samurai. The great thing about this game is that it can be taught rather quickly to new players, and game play is relatively fast (1/2 hour?) It's deceptively simple in this way.

I've downloaded the iphone app for it and now play friends and unknown others over the internet, which helps me learn new strategies.

I generally don't like strategy games that are very strategy-only, no frills (i.e. chess, go) - maybe it's somewhat a feminine thing to want a story line or like-able pieces or character, but Samurai gets me because it's simple enough and also I just like the idea and aesthetic of it-- the little black pieces of Buddahs and Rice Pattys are strangely satisfying. The design of the game is somewhat sophisticated and elegant.

Thumbs Up!

Samurai is a very good game. It's theme is totally pasted on. I actually commented "this would be easy to retheme" during the game.

The basic gameplay proceeds thusly: A board is selected based on the number of players, and 1 of each of the three figures (High Helmets, Buddhas, and Rice Fields) is placed on the main city on the board. 6 more of each figure are placed to the side of the board, and players take turns placing them in the cities, which can accommodate 2 figures each (though the figures have to be different). Once all the cities have filled their figure allotment, the villages each receive a single figure. Then players start to place their influence tiles.

Each player has like 40 tiles or something, and you take 5 of them and put them behind your screen. We just randomly took 5 and put them there, but you can choose which ones you want to start with. The rest are shuffled and put face-down in a stack near you. This is your draw pile. The 5 are hidden behind the screen, and this functions as your "hand".

So you start laying tiles. The object here is to be able to capture the figures on the board for scoring at the end of the game. A figure is captured when it's completely surrounded by influence tiles. The player who has the most influence on that figure when it's surrounded captures the figure. So if there's a village with a Buddha in it, and it's got 2 adjacent hexes next to it, once those two have player tiles on them, the village is scored and the player who has the most Buddha influence captures it.

The tiles each have different symbols and strengths, ranging from 1 to 4. So if I put down a tile with 2 Buddha on it, and my opponent immediately places a 3 Buddha to enclose the village, then the village is scored and the Buddha influence adjacent to it is tallied. The player with the 3 Buddha takes the figure.

But there's more trixy to it. Some of the tiles have a Japanese symbol on the bottom of them. These tiles can be played ninja fashion. Normally, you can only play one tile in your turn. But you can also play any number of these ninja tiles as well. One of these tiles is the "Ronin", who has 1 influence but can apply his influence to any of the figure types. Same thing with the ships, only they can't be played on land tiles. That's okay though, since most of the villages are on the coastline of the map, and exposed to at least one space of water. So you can ninja it up with those as well, coming by sea to reinforce and steal a village (need I say it? "Pirate Ninjas!").

But the ninja tiles aren't the only trixy you have up your sleeve. There are two special tiles you can play, one in ninja fashion (in addition to a normal tile) and one just as a normal tile (but it's pretty sweet). The first is a "figure swap" tile, played in ninja fashion. So you see your opponent has got his 4 influence High Helmet next to a High Helmet village. You've got a 4 High Helmet adjacent to a city with a High Helmet in it and a village with a Buddha in it. You've got a Buddha in your hand and the ninja swap. What do you do?

You swap the High Helmet figure for the Buddha figure on the board, and then play your Buddha tile for the capture! Now your 4 High Helmet is next to two of the High Helmet figures and his is wasted. You've also captured the Buddha with your single Buddha tile!

The other special tile is a "teleport" one. You are able to take an already laid tile off the board and replace it with this one (which has a 0 influence). Then you get to take the tile you took off the board and put it somewhere else. So if that dude was like "Yo, he totally snaked my High Helmet!" he can use this tile to apply his 4 High Helmet tile to another, more advantageous space - maybe a space next to the very High Helmet his opponent stole from him! Bwahahahahaah!

So all is well and good. Pretty simple, eh? Capture those figures by surrounded them with influence tiles. When all the figures are captured, the game is done. How do we score this thing, anyway?

As with many Knizia games, the method of scoring has a large bearing on how the game is played. You're only in the running for winning the game if you have the most of any figure type. If you do have the most of a figure type, then set those figures off to the side. Any remaining figures are your score at the end of the game. The player with the highest score wins!

But if you have the most in two of he 3 figure types, you automatically get the win.

So an interesting dynamic during play is introduced. If you've got the most in a single figure type, you want to maintain your lead, but you're primarily concerned with picking up the other types of figures to bolster your score. But if you've got the most in two of the figure types, you want to build those figure types up to a sure majority (4 in a 2 player game, since there are 7 figures of each type on the board).

I really dig this game. It's a lot of fun to play, and it's quick (well, it seems quick, anyway. We didn't stop playing until 9pm!). There's a goodly amount of strategy to it, and the scoring just adds gravy to that. Since your opponent is drawing tiles, you know what he's already played, but you don't know what he has in his hand (unless he doesn't have any more tiles available in his draw pile, meaning that they're all in his hand. You can then deduce what he has available to him, should you so choose). This makes it so you never really know if he's going to be able to ninja something away from you or not.

3 katanas and 2 cutlasses up! (I dig)

I like the game but it isnt anything special. It looks really nice and is good quality. The game play is rather predictable and gets old quick though.