Nippon Review

Kon’nichiwa! You must be here to look around my new lens factory! Everyone has been flocking to see it ever since the Emperor gave it his seal of approval. Come look, this is the very piece that rested against the royal brow – you’re not interested in this at all are you? You just want to read about Nippon. Fine…

 

 

Players: 2-4

Play time: 60-120 min

Age: 12+

 

 

Nippon, the Japanese word for “efficiency”, is an intimidating bundle of systems that sit together with the elegance and reliability of a Swiss watch – much like the clocks my new factory will be producing! Anyway. Come back to a time when Japan was nothing more than a beige spit of land in the ocean, ripe for coming of bright industrialisation that will change the very face of the board.

You will take on the role of one of these aspiring industrialists, much like myself, opening factories and selling goods at home and abroad. But mostly you’ll be worrying about your workforce like a good employer, making sure you don’t have too many different coloured people. Wait, what?

Working 9 to 5… what a way to make a living!

On your turn you might choose to pick up one of the colourful wooden people from the trays at the top of the board to perform one of the two actions illustrated below them. These actions include things like building a new factory, running those factories, or moving up one of the tracks on your player boards. The little guy or gal will then follow you back to said player board where they’ll join the little worker conga line you’re building up. But it’s not all fun and games in the factory business; eventually you’re going to decide you’ve collected enough workers and instead of grabbing a new one, you’ll wipe your board clean of resources, re-fill your coal and money supplies according to your position on the relevant tracks, and throw all your workers back into the black bag of unemployment. I think that’s what the rulebook called it anyway…

Now, you’ll have noticed that workers come in one of half a dozen colours, representing [arbitrary euro game mechanism], so naturally the more colours you have, the more expensive it was to hire them. For each colour of worker you had on your board, you have to pay back 3000 yen from that income you just collected. Given that at the start of the game you’ll only be collecting 12000 each time and you’ll always have at least one colour of worker, this can become quite the crippling cost!

It would be easy to understate quite how important this mechanic is. Don’t worry though, I won’t be making that mistake! Prepare yourself for a list.

1. You’re immediately thinking about your future options not just in terms of what you want to do, but in terms of what the distribution of colours is out on the board. Rather than having a plan and sticking to it, the market conditions to a degree dictate how you want to behave… but you can always forge ahead with your plan anyway, in the knowledge you’ll have to pay for it
2. You can see what colours other players are collecting, and therefore predict what they are hoping to do later. Wouldn’t it be a shame if you took their worker first?
3. When a tray is emptied, it is refilled from the next full waiting tray in the column at the edge of the board. You can therefore try and predict, even control, where the next set of colours will be placed. This encourages you to really figure out what your opponents are likely to do.
4. With this column you can see the distribution of future colours, and plan accordingly. Thus making you think many turns ahead.
5. Only once all the whole reserve column is empty do you refill all spaces from the bag and advance the round marker. When’s the best time to consolidate? Just before it refills. When does it refill? When players decide to make it refill! Arrgghh!!

Hopefully you’re getting the picture of how much you can be trying to think through as you’re playing this game, and I haven’t even told you what you’re trying to do yet! Well, score points, obviously, this is a euro game. But to do that you’ll need to be selling goods, which you can only do by running factories… which you can only do by building factories and having coal and – and oh God. Let’s start at the beginning shall we?

Becoming a Nippon industry magnate – lesson 101

Pretty much the first thing you’ll do each game is to buy a factory. These come in multiple shapes and sizes, from the humble paper and silk manufacturers you’ll start out with, up through lenses and delicious bento and on to clocks and light bulbs as your technical knowhow advances along the white track. Initially you won’t know how to build even the simplest factory, but everyone starts out with a blueprint they can spend to increase their knowledge temporarily. You’ll choose one of the corresponding sized factories according to what bonus you want.

Once a factory has been built, you can run it. Assuming you have enough coal, you can power up to 3 factories in one action, moving that coal from your player board to the limited number of goods spaces on the factories themselves. Painfully, a factory can only produce one good, unless you pay to upgrade it with machinery at some point, in which case it can potentially produce up to 3 goods for the same coal cost, making it much more efficient.

Finally! Goods! Now we can sell them and maybe earn some points! There are two ways to go about this (of course there are), you can export to foreign lands to complete one or more of your contracts, a set of tiles you start the game with. These will award you victory points, or perhaps some financial bonus. They’ll specify an amount and how many types of good you’ll need to send off at once to complete it, meaning the big scoring contract requires you to be running four different factories by the end of the game. The other way is by fulfilling the demand in the local regions of Japan.

Demanding locals

At the start of the game you’ll seed the board with these colourful… well, coloured, 4-way split demand tiles, two in each region, each side requesting a specific type of good. When you choose to fulfil demand in a region you will discard the corresponding goods from your factories and place one of your numbered tiles in the space adjacent to that demand. You even get a little area-specific reward for doing so.

“Oh sir thank you so much for that bento we were starving for Bento. Please take these two pieces of coal as an eternal symbol of our thanks to you.”

It cost me 3 coal to make the Bento…

“Omnomnomnomnom”

But Matt, what do you do if there’s already a numbered tile in that space?

Don’t worry! Just place a higher valued tile there and you kick out the previous occupant! You’re producing more/better Bento and the people of Japan love you for it.

But Matt, how do I get a higher numbered tile?

Oh God, now I have to explain the table.

You see, when you place a tile, you choose how many of your produced goods go into making it. The more goods you spend from your factory, the higher the number. But! Specific factory types produce bigger numbers. So your paper and silk can only ever make up to size 3 tiles. Bento and lenses go from 3 to 5, while light bulbs and clocks reach the dizzying heights of 5 to 7. But what do all these numbers mean?

But Matt, you still haven’t told us how to score.

I’M GETTING TO THAT! Why these numbers are important is that every second movement of the round marker (which, as I’m sure you’ll remember, happens when you refill the worker market) triggers a scoring phase, at which point you calculate who has the highest total value of tiles in each of the 4 regions, scoring points accordingly. Which means, I’m going to add point 6 to why that worker selection system is awesome:

6. Oh no, did you need another round before we scored regions? Oh I’m so sorry, I just really wanted to advance my coal track one space and that just happened to empty the last tray…

To make matters more insane, you only have a very limited number of tiles to play with. But they can be used in such interesting ways. Place one 3? Or a 1 and a 2, getting the reward from a region twice? (When you place tiles they all have to go in a single region, and so having a pair of matching goods in one region is immediately interesting. Experienced players will be stroking their beards in thought from the moment the goods distribution is revealed). Of course, placing the highest possible value will secure that tile in that region forever, but maybe you don’t have any of those tiles left. It can be fun to kick people out of spots, but you also might not want them to have that tile available again! But you’re also trying to make sure you’ve got a higher total than any of your opponents. And the fact that the board scores 3 times over the course of the game means that even while you are trying to get a decent engine running, you can’t afford to neglect the main board. Just for kicks you can also add trains to the board, which increase your influence in a region, and boats, which boost your score… so long as you come first or second in that region, really making you bet on yourself.

More points! Count your lucky stars

This idea of betting on yourself, and the resulting scramble to try and get the most from those bets is made all the more acute by the end game scoring system that I’m going to at long last reveal with a flourish. You see I left out one little rule about consolidation, that bit you do when you’re fed up of having so many workers or you’re out of resources and need to reset? When you do this, you get to take a bonus tile, giving you a little boost of extra cash, or extra coal, or some plans to help you build bigger factories. That’s nice, but what’s really nice is once collected you flip that tile over to get a multiplier, from 2x to 5x, which you put on one of the little images on your player board, as you can see above.

At the end of the game, you’ll count up the relevant elements and apply the multiplier you attached to it. So for every star I’ve past on the coal track, I’m going to get 4 points. You’ll be collecting these tiles from the very start of the game. Where to place them is such a tough decision! Because you can’t replace one, and you can’t move them once placed. You know, in every game like this you expect to have to decide on a long term strategy, but Nippon makes you put your points where your mouth is and commit! Or worse, when you have one of those mid-range multipliers like the 3x, it makes you try and figure out what are you going to do a little bit of… but not a huge amount of. Seriously!?

Oh, and what determines the size of the multiplier you get? Oh yes! It’s the total number of workers you are putting back in the bag! That’s right! Point 7!

7. I’ve taken some number of workers already, can I make best use out of taking another so I get a bigger multiplier when I consolidate? Is there even a reward left that I want at this/higher levels? Thank goodness this is the only thing I need to think about right n – oh wait.

It’s all about efficiency – unlike this review

I don’t know if you can tell from the ridiculous amount I’ve already written about Nippon but I really, really, like this game! There is a lot to it, yes, but all of those mechanisms fit together so smoothly that after the first few turns you’ll get. I have to say that Nippon is probably the next step Euro game for those looking to try a more heavy game. You’ll see why. After those first few turns the real genius of the game will make itself apparent. This game isn’t challenging because it has a complex mess of rules. No. This game is challenging, and amazing, because you know from your very first game, that every action you do could be more efficient.

Nippon is probably the next step Euro game for those looking to try a more heavy game

The game literally rubs it in your face. Here, you can complete up to 3 contracts at once with this action! Oh, do you not have the right combination of goods? Oh… that’s a shame. Sure, you can take an action to buy 1 train for 5000 money, but wouldn’t you rather spend 15000 and get 3 trains out at once? That extra 3000 yen you pay for an extra coloured worker needs to count or you might have just made your next turn less efficient, and the emperor won’t be pleased with that! The difference between a good player and a bad player isn’t what you’re doing, there are no “bad” moves, it’s just how smoothly you are linking your actions together.

This focus on efficiency isn’t just wonderful from a gameplay stand-point, it works wonderfully on a thematic level too. You really do feel like the head of some industrial conglomerate, constantly trying to figure out how you can most optimally use your resources to squeeze the absolute most from this coal driven engine you’ve put together. Then there are the little touches like the regional rewards encouraging investment at certain stages of the game, mirroring Japan’s real world development. It’s easy to dismiss Nippon’s tragically beige board as just another complex economic Euro game, but it’s not. It’s an exceptional complex economic Euro game.

 

Rating: Get Nipp-on it!

 

If you want to really get in deep with the full rules of Nippon, go check out the official how to play video by Gaming Rules!, who totally didn’t promise me cake to say that. Seriously though, it’s the way to go if you want to learn more!