Kohaku Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Kohaku, a tile laying game published by 25th Century Games. In Kohaku, players are drafting tiles and placing them in their own personal koi pond with the goal of earning the most points.

In addition to being Board Game Quest’s self-professed movie person, I also wear a variety of other hats around the office. I pride myself on being the team’s self-professed plant person (“That’s a Ficus, Tony, not a Fir.”) and am often astonished when anyone questions my self-professed mastery of handcrafts (“Macrame is done by hand, not with crochet hooks, Brandon.”)

One thing I don’t get a chance to talk about much is my advanced knowledge of the animal kingdom, in particular the creatures who live in water. So, as BGQ’s newly anointed (and yet still self-professed) ichthyologist, I jumped at the chance to try out Kohaku from designer and artist Danny Devine. The game is for 1-4 pond-builders and plays in about a half hour.

Kohaku is a drafting and tile placement game in which players will be building their own personal koi pond and scoring points based on how beautiful it is. (This is determined mostly by adjacency bonuses, which in real life wouldn’t last very long since fish tend to move around a lot.). Each turn, players will take two adjacent tiles from the main pond board. The board is set up in a way so that two fish can never be a taken, nor can two feature tiles. Therefore, players will take one of each on their turn and add them to their own personal play area (er, pond). There are no placement restrictions once you’ve taken the tiles so long as they are placed orthogonally adjacent to a previously placed piece.

There are 12 styles of fish with some being a solid color and others being multicolored. Some fish also