Only a Pawn in Their Game (Nippon)

During an old video review published by the clever and astute duo of No Pun Included, Efka Bladukas said, quite deadpan, that “Nippon” was Japanese for “efficiency.” It was so deadpan–and I’m apparently enough of a philistine–that I believed it, no questions asked. You probably know that “Nippon” is actually is just a Japanese word meaning, ummm, “Japan.” It’s literal meaning is “the sun’s origin,” as in “the land of the rising sun.”

My naiveté aside, whatever the word for “efficiency” in Japanese is, that word would be a great name for Nippon, too!

Nippon (2015)

Designed by Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro & Paulo Soledade

Art by Mariano Iannelli

Published by What’s Your Game?

Its gorgeous cover aside, Nippon is one of the more stock-looking euro game–at first glance. Cubes, factories, a map with places for you to put markers of your color. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz… But wait! Not terribly unlike Village (2011), Nippon can almost hear what you’re thinking, but unlike Village–which added one mechanic to put a nice spin on a typical euro–Nippon subverts your expectations at every turn. Worker placement? Not really. Long term planning by saving your money? Hah! You simply cannot do that. Fulfilling orders/objectives for points? Not for points, brother.

Options are myriad, rounds are short, and no matter what you do, the game will be forcing you to pay through the nose every step of the way.

Lowdown (How to Play–in a Nutshell)

This game is fairly heavy, so rather than discuss actual actions or granular nuts and bolts of play, I’ll try and give you a broad overview and highlight some of the unique aspects of the game.

Nippon, by all accounts is a worker placement game, but not really. Those workers are the first thing you see when you first look at the board, but it’s all a ruse. At the top of the main map board are five columns, with all but one associated with two different action spaces (that fifth space is associated with only one big action space). Above each top action space, a random assortment of workers are sprinkled both during setup and in periodic refreshers throughout play. These workers are basic meeples of a variety of colors. On your turn you’ll take a meeple and add it to a track on your board, then you take one of the actions in the corresponding column. As you take more actions, maybe you’ll have a technicolor collection of workers on your track, or maybe you’ll be lucky enough to get duplicate colors (this is a good thing, by the way). Soon enough, you’ll be out of room on your track and you’ll need to take a consolidate action, instead, which will clear off your track, replenish your money and coal, and allow you to take more actions. The catch is that you have to pay your workers based on color. So if you have four workers of four different colors (eg red, blue, yellow, and white), you’ll be paying for a total of four workers. But if, instead, you have four workers of two different colors (eg two reds and two greens) you only have to pay for two workers. Duplicate colors are free!

Consolidating in Nippon is essentially that upkeep phase you have in many euro games. That being said, the game incentivizes you to wait longer before consolidating. The more workers you have on your track, the higher an end game scoring multipliers you’ll receive to place on your board, helping steer you towards some points at the game’s end. For example, if you have enough workers in your track, you will gain a x5 multiplier for you to put on an end game bonus space, like a space that signifying regions on the board. (This is hard to explain, but essentially in this example, once you get that x5 multiplier, it means you will gain 5 points for each region you’ve gotten one of your markers into by the end of the game; there are other spaces meaning things like “for every 6,000 Yen” or “for every advanced factory you’ve built,” etc)

Anyway, what are you doing with these workers? The point is to build factories, produce goods using coal, and then ship your goods oversees to fulfill orders for money and bonuses, or instead ship your goods locally across Japan to take a market share of an industry in a specific region. Each time you need to replenish meeples and there aren’t any meeples left, you’ll advance the turn marker one step forward. If you pass a scoring marker, you’ll score points for area control (or sometimes just presence) in each region on the map. The more goods you ship, the better your control is. After the third scoring round, you’ll add up all points, including from the end game multipliers you’ve been accumulating throughout the game, and the player with the most points wins.

Tea for Two (Scaling for Two Players)

Nippon is a reasonably fast game with two, but I’m not sure how fast it would be with three or four. The number of seeded meeples is different based on the player count. The first time we played, the game felt too short, but subsequent plays haven’t felt too short, but rather fast enough to drive you, but not so fast that you don’t have time to do things. Just fast enough to see the mistakes you make and wave at them as they fly by.

The other main scaling factor is that with two players only, there is a limit to the number of markers you can place in each city (two), meaning more often than not you’ll have one of each player’s color in each city. Each city will score points after each scoring phase is entered, giving points for first, second, and third place (the highest level marker you put out). But, to complicate things, each empty city space has a value in it, meaning that there is functionally a phantom player fighting for control of each city, too. Any uncovered number counts towards that phantom player’s control value, making it very difficult to get that coveted top points space in the area control scoring round. At most, you’ll probably get second behind the game itself.

All this is confusing to explain without really running through the rules, so I’ll just cut to it: this plays great with two.

Thorn Within (The Bad Stuff)

By all accounts, Nippon is a worker placement game (although Joel Eddy of Drive Thru Review Games described it beautifully as “worker displacement,” which is dead on), but all that worker juggling doesn’t actually score you any points. At first, you’d think the workers are really the main engine for those points, but they’re more like your utility tools in doing everything else. The points here are almost all in area control, not in production or any of the other basic action, and that’s deceptive. It’s all about the area control. Speaking of scoring via area control, if you find yourself running behind in the game, you are going to be hammered. And back to those workers, they really just stand in your way more often than not. Those workers are a money pit, because you have to pay 3,000 Yen for each difference color.

This can be really frustrating, because sometimes those meeple colors do not favor what you’re doing, and instead of picking four meeples and doing those for things you really need to do, you can’t because you can’t afford four different colored meeples. And slowly but surely, you have to sit and watch your opponent get their pieces on the board and score while you are stuck trying to scrape up money to catch up. There is a ton of stuff you can focus on in this game (upgrading machinery, building trains, building boats, upgrading coal production, fulfilling foreign orders, etc), and it’s easy to get lost down a rabbit hole that turns out to be, points-wise, a total dead end. But all of these aspects are interconnected, so you feel like you have to do everything. Nippon forces you to make tough decisions, and it often leaves you nothing but regrettable choices. You need to produce, but you don’t have enough coal; you want to up your coal production, but that won’t give you coal now, you need to ship locally to get a marker on the map, because if the next player takes that one meeple, it will trigger a scoring round and you’ll lose your shirt!

Not unlike Heaven & Ale (2017), Nippon is hard on the players. I wouldn’t call it brutal or unforgiving, but instead it feels like Nippon is a taskmaster. The game is demanding you to be an efficient manager, but it’s giving you no resources and no time to do it.

Carpe Diem Baby (The Good Stuff)

A lot of those bad things, well, they’re excellent. One of the more remarkable moments I’ve had in a game recently was a round of Nippon where I had a handful of actions I felt like I had to do, but I ended up abandoning my turn and consolidating early because I realized that I was better off not taking a new colored worker and spending 3,000 more Yen to pay for it. Here’s the thing about Nippon, when you consolidate, you loseall of your unspent money and coal. Yes, all of it. it is impossible to save your money turn-to-turn in hopes of paying for lots of workers in one turn and having that BIG TURN. That 2,000 Yen you didn’t spend this turn won’t roll over. Ditto next time. If you didn’t efficiently utilize your workers and money to maximize your turn, that’s tough on you. Remember, Nippon is Japanese for “efficiency” (it’s still not, by the way), so if you aren’t efficient, you are going to watch your money go up in smoke, along with your chances of winning.

Not having the ability to build up to your BIG TURN, Nippon forces you to grind your way through the game, slowly trying to out-think or out-maneuver your opponent. Should you fulfill overseas orders to increase your income level? That always feels like an excellent idea, because money is everything, and the more you have, the more you can do. At the same time, if you lean into fulfilling orders, the game will just slip away from you. Your carefully produced goods are hard to make, are you willing to pass up putting your markers on the map by fulfilling local orders just so you can make 2,000 more Yen each turn by fulfilling an overseas order? Cash will help you optimize your factories maybe, but what good will that cash be if you have no coal? What good will that cash be if you don’t have enough time to produce and ship? Cash converts to points, but it’s a bad conversion rate.

I can’t say enough about the gameplay of Nippon. This game is perfectly suited towards how I think, and the fact that it is essentially a game of nothing but tough decisions means it feels like it was designed for me. The worker displacement is puzzly, the rounds are fast and furious, and the game demands you to fight like hell to score those points. Love it.

The End (Final Thoughts)

Kathleen isn’t a huge fan of Nippon, but it’s a matter of preference. She agrees the game is remarkably well-designed, she just doesn’t like the demands it makes of the players, and I understand. Nippon forces you to diversify your actions, but ultimately all in service of the area control. If you aren’t able to manage that area control effectively, you will find this game very frustrating. Despite that respect for the design, it’s simply not suited to Kathleen’s play style.

At the end of the day, the good things and bad things are, for me, both good things. Everything I put into the “bad stuff” section ultimately equates to more tough decisions. I like that the game is a four course meal of which you can only eat one appetizer. Nippon presents you with a whole host of options, but gives you only the time and money to do ¼ of what you’d like to do in a perfect world. Everything boils down to that time and money, and those are in such short supply here.

We played this game a bunch of times in the week or two after I got it, which got it into my top 10. It went dormant for a while. We pulled it out last week, and part of me was afraid it would have cooled a little. It didn’t. It climbed even higher in my top 10 list. It’s fantastic, and now it’s one of my favorite games. 

This box is so crammed full of difficult choices, I can’t help but marvel at how difficult the decisions feel. For me, Nippon gets the highest marks. That being said, I fully understand it’s not for everyone. But if anything at all about this sounds interesting, get it. Get it now.

Player One

Eric

Nippon
by Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro
& Paulo Soledade

This is a heavy game, so I cannot in good conscience recommend this for everyone. That being said, if you like Euros that aren’t afraid of rules or brain burn, search this out, it is well, well worth it.

Highly recommended (for the right group).