I love the 2012 game Tokaido, from 7 Wonders designer Antoine Bauza, both for its gameplay and its art by the French illustrator known as Naïade, which echoes the Edo period of Japanese culture in which the game is set. (More on that in a moment.) It plays two to five players but is definitely better with more, and worst with two, because the game board sends players on a walk along the Tokaido Road, one of the Five Routes of that time period in Japan, and if you’re on a space, I can’t go there – I have to pass you. More players thus means more spaces each player has to skip, and harder choices of where to land. Tokaido even has a sequel, Namiji, which borrows the core movement mechanic from the first game but changes all of the actions available.
Now we have a two-player version of the game, Tokaido Duo, that is almost completely different beyond the theme. Here the two players each have three different meeples – a pilgrim, a merchant, and an artist – who move in different ways around the smaller board, with only the pilgrim’s movement restricted by direction. The scoring is also greatly simplified from the original, and changes what you might be trying to collect or otherwise do. It’s excellent, but it’s pretty different, at least as different as 7 Wonders Duel is from 7 Wonders, if not more so.
The Tokaido Duo board has a track around the outer edge of the island for the pilgrims, tracks connecting four mountain towns in the center to eight coastal towns around the perimeter for the merchants, and sectors formed by the outer pilgrim track and interior pilgrim tracks. The artists can move from sector to sector, with each one showing one of four types of paintings that can be ‘gifted’ there. On each turn, the first player rolls the three dice – one per meeple type – and chooses one, after which the other player chooses one, and the first player gets the last one. The dice show movement values from 1-3 or 1-4, and when a player chooses a die they must use the entire movement value.
The merchants collect goods at the mountain towns and sell them at the coastal towns. You grab 2-4 from the bag of wares when you go to a mountain town, and each coastal town has a token showing one of the four goods and a sale price. You can only hold five wares at a time, so you have to plan out your moves for maximum efficiency, but in a coastal town you can sell all of your goods of that type at once. You get points based on how many 10-coin gold bars you gain in the game. The artist paints paintings and gifts them to the gods; when your artist moves to a new sector, you flip over a number of painting tokens from your board equal to the number of other meeples (yours and your opponent’s) in/around that sector. You can only gift one at a time, however. Your points here are based on how many painting tiles you flipped and gifted, increasing in value as you go.
The pilgrim track has at least five different types of spaces, but I’ll just focus on the two that score. Your pilgrim board has three tracks, temple and garden. You move up a track when your pilgrim lands on a matching space. At game end, your points from the pilgrim equal the product of your places on the two tracks. The pilgrim is also blocked from stopping at any space occupied by the other pilgrim or either merchant, which does recall the original game.
When either player reaches the end of one pilgrim track, gains their sixth gold bar, or gifts their final painting, the game ends. Each player adds up their scores from the three boards. It takes maybe 30 minutes, probably less with more experience.
I haven’t quite figured out if it’s better to push hard to finish the game with one of the three types, which also implies a high score from that one board, or strive for balance; the original Tokaido did a great job of forcing you to find a middle ground between the two, with some specialization required to win … but not too much. I think it’s better here to finish a little sooner than I like to, but I also just like playing the game and doing things even if it’s not great strategy.
It’s a very satisfying game, because almost every turn gets you something, and you’re always left wishing you could just do one more thing before your next turn. There isn’t much direct player interaction here, just some tokens that can get passed back and forth with no real take-that mechanic, with public scores that at least make it easy to see if you’re in the lead. This is, however, a huge example of cultural appropriation in gaming. Neither Bauza nor Naïade is even a little bit Japanese, and they’ve dropped this game into perhaps the most significant period in Japanese history, the time when Japan was largely united under a stable government and experienced economic and cultural growth for over 250 years. If you know much about Japanese culture prior to the last half of the 20th century, you know about the Edo period, its shoguns and its art (The Great Wave off Kanagawa) and theater (kabuki) and more. I personally love the artwork here, and if it’s disrespectful to its theme, I am unaware of it. I’m just increasingly uncomfortable with how easily designers grab themes from well beyond their cultures without at least acknowledging it, or better still incorporating ideas or feedback from people from those cultures.
That won’t bother most folks; if anything, I think the majority of players will love the look of the game. The illustrations are fun and distinctive, while there’s a lot of white space to keep everything easy to see and understand. We’ve had a slew of new two-player games this year, and Tokaido Duo is one of the better ones.