Yotei Review – Hot potato!

A preview copy of Yotei was kindly provided by Mighty Boards. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

Imagine if you took a game like Splendor and filled it with potatoes instead of gems. That’s Yotei! Review’s over, on you go. But seriously, Yotei is a gorgeous small-box game from Mighty Boards that builds on the card-drafting, tableau-building principles of games like Splendor, Point City (review here), Wingspan (review here), or even the often overlooked Santa Monica (review here). It’s cute, it’s quick, it’s clever, and by adding a blind bidding system, it adds a fresh new twist which warrants your attention.

Board games, and even more so card games, really struggle to implement some kind of theme. The canvas of your imagination needs to do a lot of work to make you feel like you’re at the place, or doing the thing the game is about. Yotei takes a really good stab at adding some colours to your mental palette. The game is based around Mt. Yotei on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. The artwork is based on real-life places and things, and the pieces the game uses are made from wood sourced from Hokkaido. Little things like this don’t necessarily make a game better, but they help you create some form of emotional attachment.

Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew

I confess that before I played Yotei, I didn’t realise how big potato farming is in Hokkaido. Apparently, they grow some pretty amazing potatoes there. They play a big part in Yotei. They’re the game’s currency. Cards cost potatoes to buy from the market, and bids are made in potatoes.

In principle, Yotei is pretty simple. You draft cards from the market to add to your tableau, and the cards you add have tags/icons on them, which act as prerequisites for more expensive cards from higher rows in the market, with the ultimate goal of getting the top row cards with stars on them.

You take turns placing your kawaii character tokens on cards to reserve them, and most of those cards cost either nothing or a number of potatoes. The most interesting cards are the ones that players can bid on. There are some really cute little wooden crates available to the players, and to bid on a card, you take your little crate and then add as many potatoes as you like in there, even none at all. It’s a really nice little twist because it adds in some new layers to the gameplay.

When you resolve your turn, you take the cards in the order you choose, so you can use the potatoes you earn from one card to pay the cost of another you’ve reserved. Some of the cards that go into the market are obviously really powerful when it comes to giving you the requirements for the top row vending machine cards, which in turn have the game-ending stars on. These cards often attract these secret bidding wars, which are made all the more fun by the fact that each player stores their potatoes behind a screen.

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Can you remember how many potatoes Jane has? What about Steve? Didn’t he just spaff all his potatoes in the last round? Oh, he just put his last marker on the potato card, so he probably doesn’t have any, so maybe he made a zero-spud bid? Stuff like that will spin around your head for the entire game.

Final thoughts

There’s not much else to say about Yotei. It’s really good fun. If you like games like the Point series or Splendor, you’ll have a great time with Yotei. It has its own twist with the blind bidding, the artwork and production are absolutely beautiful, and it doesn’t take an age to play. It’s just the sort of game to start or end a games night with, or to pass an hour with some coffee and cake at a games cafe.

One thing to note is the wooden tokens. Certainly in the preview copy I have, they were a nightmare to get out of the pieces holding them, and the crates were very tight getting together. Making them all without snapping or damaging one of the thin pieces is a real challenge. Not the end of the world, and hopefully the tolerances get sorted by the time Kickstarter backers get their copies.

Yotei is a lovely thing. The magnetic clasping box, the artwork, the attention to detail on the cards. It just makes me smile to play. If games of this sort are your thing, I think you’ll really dig(!) this one.

The Yotei Kickstarter campaign starts on April 14th.

Pros & Cons