Atiwa Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Atiwa, a worker placement game designed by Uwe Rosenburg. Published by Lookout Games, Atiwa seeks to be both a historically accurate and thematic worker placement euro game.

This is a guest post from Brett Mowers.

It’s not often a board game makes me want to learn German, read a book about its theme, and wish more games had bat meeples, but Atiwa, Uwe Rosenburg’s newest big box game, does just that. Atiwa is a worker placement game for 1-4 players that will take 60-90 minutes per play.

Set in a unique region of Ghana, Atiwa challenges players to manage a player board full of resources and build up their personal play area with new location and terrain cards to store these resources. At first glance, Atiwa’s main board will remind players of an earlier Rosenburg game, A Feast for Odin, with its myriad of worker placement spots. It can be overwhelming at first, but the choices here are simpler, much to the game’s credit. For a bit of variability, 6 of the worker placement spots are randomized at the start using tiles, which also slide to the left each round to cover up old spots and open up new ones.

Atiwa is all about the bats. During a game, players will plant trees to gain fruit which in turn will attract new bats. New bats will eat your fruit resources and excrete seeds which allow new trees to grow. Trees bear fruit that can feed your villagers. At the same time you’re building this ecological engine, players will build new villages and try to educate their families on the benefits of the bats. Players who expand too quickly or recklessly will find their families eating precious resources for food (including bats), polluting the environment, and not attracting the bats needed to keep the ecosystem