Onitama

Small board, five by five squares, wooden or cardstock disks for the pieces depending which printing you get. Mine came with cardstock and I’ve replaced it in my head with poker chips more than once, though I never got around to actually doing it. The board folds and the whole thing fits into a box not much bigger than a deck of cards.

Each player has four student pawns and one master pawn that starts on a marked square. You capture by landing on an enemy piece, and you win either by capturing the enemy master or by walking your own master onto their starting square. Straightforward goals. What makes the game is the cards. There are sixteen movement cards total, each showing a small grid with marked squares indicating how a piece can move from its position, things like straight ahead two, or diagonal one and back one. Each player holds two cards, there’s one shared card in the middle, and a fifth sits off to the side showing which color goes first. When you play a card to move a piece, that card passes to the middle and the card that was sitting there comes to your hand, so the whole set of allowed moves is constantly rotating between the two players. Only five of the sixteen cards are ever in play in a given game, drawn randomly at setup, so the character of a match changes completely depending on the draw.

That rotation is the whole trick of the game and it took me a few plays to really see it. You’re not just planning your own move, you’re planning what card you’re about to hand your opponent, because whatever you play goes straight into their hand’s pull. Good players bait a capture using a card they don’t mind giving away. I lost my first several games up here without understanding why I kept handing my opponent exactly the move he needed, before I realized the opponent was a puzzle book of solo variants and I only had myself to blame for the design.

It plays fast, most games done in fifteen minutes, and it survives a pack fine, thin box, no glass, no fiddly bits beyond the pawns which don’t roll far even if the box gets jostled. My complaint is that it’s strictly two-player with no real solo mode built in, the closest thing is working through the included puzzle challenges, which are fine for an evening but don’t have the tension of an opponent actually trying to out-think you. I’ve played most of my games against a ranger who comes through every couple weeks doing trail counts, and it holds up fine as a game you can teach in five minutes and still be losing to a month later.