Katamino Review

boardgamequest.com:

Take a game of Tetris, knock it over on its side, and you have Katamino. Well ok, not exactly, but it does have kind of the same feel to it. Brightly colored polyomino shapes that you are trying to fit into a rectangular area. Cue in some retro music and you’ve got all the nostalgia you could want.

Katamino is a solo pattern-building game that will have you trying to complete increasingly difficult puzzles.

Playing Katamino is super easy. The game comes with a board and 12 different shapes. The rulebook will give you 4 to start with and you need to place all 4 of those in the slotted section of the board, with no empty spaces. Do that, and you move the divider up one level and are given another piece. Repeat until you’ve placed all the pieces for the difficulty level.

Note, each time you move the divider up, you take all the pieces out and start anew. So it’s not just adding one piece, but figuring out how to fit all the pieces again.

I kind of feel like I’ve been covering quite a few games lately that would fall into the “activity” category rather than game. While Katamino does have an end point (get to level top level of the chart), there is no score, competition, or really winning. It’s a solo, thinky puzzle that’s actually a lot harder than it looks.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fit all the shapes in perfectly (so I’ve thought), only to have one piece just not fit. Katamino is full of those “ah ha” moments when you finally get all the pieces to click, and is really satisfying when that happens. That being said, when you get past the intro levels, things can get pretty tricky. I’ve not solved much past the “Small Slams” as they call it, but as you get deeper into the challenges, things can get a a bit frustrating at times. There also aren’t any hints or solutions, so if you get stuck, your only option is to keep plugging away.

The game also comes with a 2-player mode, but it’s kind of tacked on. On the back of the rulebook is a 8×8 grid, and you just take