Kanagawa

Kanagawa is a simple but fun game where you are artists painting a panorama and building your skills and supplies. It was created by Brune Cathala and Charles Chevallier, published by iello, and the artist is Jade Mosch. 

Players: 2-4
Suggested Playtime: 45 minutes. 

BGG Rating: 7.1

This was the first time that either of us have played this game and we watched two gameplay videos on YouTube:

• "How to Play Kanagawa by IELLO" by Zia Comics
• "Kanagawa, how to play (In English)" by Games4lifeBG

Our first game took about 45 minutes and our scores were: Danny (33) and MB (28). We came back for a second game which was much quicker at a little over 19 minutes and our scores were: MB (36) and Danny (28).

The game has a few key strategies you can take and enough different ways to collect points that you can't be sure of who actually won until you count them all up. The actions are a little confusing at first but once you get the hang of it it all moves along quite quickly with players taking actions quite independently. It is worth keeping an eye on the 'Diploma' tiles which can add very valuable points at the end, as well as taking note of who has the Grand Master. The game mechanics had a bit of everything including Set Collection, Push-Your-Luck, & Worker Placement (ish).

The artwork for this game is simple but quite beautiful - the cover art on the box reminded us of feeding the deer in Nara while we were in Japan earlier this year. 

We will definitely play this one again as it is a nice 'warm up' game to play ahead of the 'main game' on a board game night due to the length and reasonably straightforward objective. 

MB:

Overall thoughts: Really cool game - quite complicated and I am still not 100% sure if we were playing it completely right the first time around but it was pretty fun. I think once you get the hang of it is quite quick - especially with just two players.

Best bit: I thought the components were quite original - the paint pots are so clever and I like that they are not uniform. I also liked the arty mission for this game - as an art nerd it kind of plays to my passions. 

Worst bit: As silly as this sounds the insert in the box is a bit confusing but we figured it out - although I wish it had tighter spaces to store the tiles. One of our cats (Aggie) really liked knocking over paintbrushes and kept coming back for more. I also disliked that I lost. I found the instructions quite confusing and we watched two youtube videos to figure it out. 

Next time: I would probably keep the same strategy but we played it again just one night after the first play as we wanted to get our heads around it and it was a lot easier the second time. I still have a couple of questions that I want to answer about the rules - I found some of the finer detail a bit tricky to understand but I'm sure if I read the rules cover to cover it would be more clear.

Danny:

Overall thoughts: It was fun but I didn't fully understand it - probably because neither of us had played this one before. It was quicker than expected, and overall it was "nice".

Best bit: Still have a lot to learn about it to find what I like the best. 

Worst bit: Trying to stack cards underneath cards was very awkward and they kept sliding around - maybe we would like to sleeve this game to stop this happening. 

Next time: After the first game I wanted to try work out a strategy more and stick with it. I tried doing this in our second play through and it felt better but I scored less points. 

Overall Rating Game 1: 12.5/20 (Danny rated 6.5, and MB rated 6)

Overall Rating Game 2: 13.5/20 (Danny rated 7, and MB rated 6.5)

We want to include ratings in our play recaps but we also want to make it clear that these ratings are based just on how this play went for us rather than a rating of the game itself - as it is quite hard to rate the game after just a few infrequent plays.