Honshu Review
This is Honshu.
Players: 2-5
Time: 30-40 mins
Age: 8+
Inside Honshu’s utterly beautiful exterior is a card game that miraculously combines more mechanisms than a box this size has any right to. It is a city building game, a trick-taking game, a tile-laying game and a game of resource management. You can even throw in some personal objectives if you’d like. Yet this is all done using 60 odd cards and a few cubes.
Oh. I forgot to mention it has drafting too.
Anyway, a game of Honshu begins with a hand of 6 cards, a starting card to form the basis of your personal city, and the cloying feeling that the box’s artwork didn’t quite make it as far as the cards themselves.
Still, the cards hardly look bad and, as you’ll soon see, the city you build looks even better than the sum of its parts. Each card displays some mix of scenery across its 6 sub-divided blocks. From deserts to lakes, forests to factories, these are the elements that will come together to score you points at the end of the game depending on how they’ve been placed within your city, but before we get to the nitty-gritty of Japanese city planning you want to be paying attention to the number each card has printed on it.
Each round begins with players choosing a card to play from their hand. The higher the value, the more likely you are to end up higher in turn order. This is important because then, in turn order, players choose one of the cards played to keep and add to their city. Thus, the higher you play, the better your choice of cards for building your city but like the best trick-taking games, there’s a catch. In the next round you have to choose your “trick” card first, letting everyone else respond to your play. Every step in this process offers up some nice crunchy decisions. When you have good cards for building you want to try and make sure you get them, when you have bad cards for you, you want to hope to play when someone else will take them. At the same time you’re hoping to manipulate turn order and if you’re really paying attention, you’re judging what other people want for their cities.
Once you’ve chosen a card from the centre, it’s time to add it to your city in what is a brilliant use of cards. The rule is that a new card must either cover up one or more squares of an existing tile, or be slipped beneath an existing card to cover up one or more of it’s squares (or very occasionally, both). This will have you pouring over your cards, rotating them or yourself, trying to find that perfect spot, or finally shrugging your shoulders and finding that uncomfortable but acceptable compromise.
The driving force for this difficulty is, of course, how the different elements score at the end of the game. In particular, houses want to form into this vast, connected mass, the bigger the better, as only your biggest region of houses will score. Similarly with lakes, but these are much more valuable and naturally much rarer. You’ll never see more than one on a card meaning creating a long line of lakes (or a “river” as some might call it) takes some serious contortions and possibly some serious compromises.
Forests are just nice to have around, worth a couple of points just for being there. Easy to forget about but equally easy to create a forest paradise like city that looks suspiciously like a Centre Parcs from above. Deserts are unsurprisingly worthless and the first things to be built over in later rounds, giving you the satisfaction of turning barren wasteland into verdant green spaces with the placement of a single card. The final regions are factories and their partner production spaces. This is where the cubes come in and, as with so many things involving cubes, demand a little more explanation than the other spaces.
Production spaces generate resources. Little cubes of wood, stone, yellow and fish fingers. At the end of the game you want to match up one cube to a correspondingly coloured factory, where it will be turned into some quantity of lotus flowers (aka victory points). So, moving that brown cube in the picture to the brown factory space will score you a sweet 3 lotases – loti, umm… points! Of course, those cubes need to sit there throughout the game, meaning you don’t want to build over production spaces. That said, there are useful things you can do with them mid game…
Resource cubes can be spent to boost the value of your card by a whopping 60 (the highest valued card available) during the trick at the start of each round. This gives you the satisfying experience of laying down a card and saying “I see your 48 and raise you one fish cube” and everyone round the table will not only know what you mean, they will gasp in shock. Interestingly, once someone has played a cube, they have in a sense set the suit. If anyone else wants to play a cube, they’ll have to match the cube’s colour. It can be a cunning strategy then to try and monopolise a particular colour of cube to try and dominate the trick taking side of the game. But again, once you’ve done it once you’re stuck going first.
For reasons I don’t fully understand, after 3 rounds (half a hand) you have a short drafting phase where you pass the remaining cards to the player on your left. This means you want to get your best cards out as soon as possible because passing your opponent a hand of rubbish is amusing, but I’m not entirely clear on why it’s present in the game other than adding one more mechanic to a list that is already ludicrously long. After 6 cards are played and your hand is empty another 6 cards are dealt out and you repeat the process to see out the game. There is a difference though.
In the first half of the game the choices are fairly easy. Maybe you decide to start building a lake or really chase after that grand region of buildings but it never feels too difficult to find a spot to place stuff and player order doesn’t seem like an overwhelming big thing to worry about. But as you get into the second half, with a big bright hand of new cards you sit up and really start to worry about your final score. You don’t want any unused cubes or factories that aren’t scoring, and that lonely house there, wouldn’t it be nice if it could join the large growing community you have built up nearby? It’s like going from the frivolity of youth to middle aged, middle class, neatness and it makes every decision of those final rounds that much more important. Finding those perfect cards really feels awesome while realising you’ve ended up with another hungry factory to feed is immensely disappointing.
It’s in this second half where the game goes from an interesting curio to a triumphant experience whether you win or lose you’re left with the sprawl of a city that is most definitely yours, showcasing the elements you pursued the most, the mistakes you made and the spots where everything came together. Sometimes the mix of different mechanisms gets a bit much: it’s easier to teach people who’ve seen these mechanisms in other games but can be a little overwhelming for newer gamers. For those who have played a few games though, this is a little title full of crunchy decisions that won’t take up too much of your evening or your shelf space.
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