Players then receive trees, fruit and fruit bats based on the number of resources removed from their supply board. On a player’s turn, they will place one of their workers onto an available action location, each of which can only accommodate a single worker, and then pay any associated costs before performing the action…or not. Players are allowed to place workers onto action spaces they have no intention of using if they choose to do so. And, players are not required to gain all the benefits from their chosen action location either. For example, if a player placed their worker on the space that rewards them with two Wild Animals, they could choose to take zero, one, or two animals.

Once the worker action is taken, you can take an optional fruit bat action – only if you have 3+ fruit bats, you have a tree on your board and you also have a space available for another tree. If so, place 3 fruit bats on your night card and then place a new tree on one of your cards. (This represents the bat’s nightly search for food, then their pooping out the seeds and the growth of a new tree…) At first glance, you might think the board rivals something like A Feast For Odin in terms of action spaces to place your workers. In reality, the choices are much more simple. Many of the actions involve moving something from your supply board (goats, wildlife, trees, families, fruit) to your village spaces, usually by trading something else in return. The game’s economy is really easy to grasp. Above and below the main board are new tiles to add to your tableau, representing wild areas (things like grasslands, lakes, caves), or living areas such as villages and towns. Expanding your tableau with these tiles is essential as the game goes on. At the end of a game at my local games club. Atiwa has a relatively small footprint.

End of the Game

Set in a unique region of Ghana, Atiwa challenges players to manage a player board full of resources and build up their personal play area with new location and terrain cards to store these resources. At first glance, Atiwa’s main board will remind players of an earlier Rosenburg game, A Feast for Odin, with its myriad of worker placement spots. It can be overwhelming at first, but the choices here are simpler, much to the game’s credit. For a bit of variability, 6 of the worker placement spots are randomized at the start using tiles, which also slide to the left each round to cover up old spots and open up new ones. So, here's a bit of a rarity for this blog: an actual REVIEW! ... as in: a fully-baked opinion that isn't based on mere first impressions, and has been written after I've got a decent number of plays of the game in question under my belt! There are several aspects of Atiwa that I really enjoy. The way that action tiles move from round to round is very interesting and can create some tense gameplay moments as you are hoping no one goes to the space you desperately need. There are some static placement spots that don’t change from game to game but some that are variable and I like the variability. There is a decent selection of terrain tiles which are all different and varied adding to the variability. I appreciate both of these things as it will make you change your overall strategy from game to game. Supplies For You Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Kibi, the mayor is causing a stir by giving shelter to a large number of fruit bats in his own garden. This man has recognized the great value the animals have in deforested regions of our planet: Fruit bats sleep during the day and take off at sunset in search of food, looking for suitable fruit trees up to sixty miles away. They excrete the seeds of the consumed fruit, disseminating them across large areas as they fly home. A single colony of 150,000 fruit bats can reforest an area of up to two thousand acres a year. Otherwise, the game is set up to reward you for success – if you have enough animals, you get trees. When you have lots of trees, you get fruit. When you have lots of fruit, you get bats. The bats and fruit can be used in the next round to get you even more trees. But, then, when you want to advance, you’ll need to spend those trees to get the cards; and then when you add families, they’ll eat all the animals. So the game is one of ebbs and flows where you have periods of prosperity followed by times of regrowth.

Feeding: To feed your Families, first determine the food demand. Subtract the number of the rightmost uncovered Goat from the number of the rightmost uncovered Family to determine the total. Then pay some combination of tokens and/or gold until this total is met. Wild Animals, Fruit, Goats, and Gold can be spent for different amounts. And untrained Families will even consume Fruit bats. You’ll lose two points for each unfed Family. However, in all the games that I have played, I have yet to see this happen. The food value of each item is shown on the Overview card. Everyone has that same goal; but interestingly, there isn’t as much direct competition as you’d expect. Each player has their own ecosystem of animals, trees, families and fruit – as well as their own cards for placing those things. Sure, you compete somewhat for the actions; but there are a lot of action choices available to the players, and there is no competition nor interference once things make it to your little world.

A new Uwe Rosenberg. When will it be available?

Dans Atiwa, vous développez une petite communauté au Ghana, tout en gérant les populations de chauves-souris. Passionnant, pertinent ! ATIWA is a 1-4 player “advanced level” game based in the ATIWA region of Ghana and revolves around, you guessed it, building a new community! But this one has a fruity twist! You have seen a nearby area prosper as a result of harnessing the crop reseeding (aka pooping!) powers of the indigenous fruit bat population, and you want some of that action! You will therefore be tasked with establishing a village that exploits the eco-friendly relationship between fruit bats and farmers. Reforestation for roosting! Preservation for population growth! Poop for profits!

It’s not often I walk away from a game thinking about its theme and wanting to research it even more. Atiwa is an important game because I truly believe it was designed to educate people about a threatened ecological region and what makes it unique. That it’s also a fun game experience makes for an easy recommendation from me. For fans of worker placement, you’ll love having a wide range of actions on each turn. For fans of engine and tableau building, you’ll agonize in deciding whether you should build out your terrain cards, providing space for valuable resources, or gaining those resources immediately to fill up your board and get more income later. As a hallmark of a good worker placement game, you’ll always want one more worker than you have. Next, each player receives a Supply board along with eight Wild Animal, thirteen Tree, eight Fruit, thirteen Family, and seven Goat tokens which are placed on top of their matching spots. Each player also receives a Night card, one of each Overview card, and the Worker meeples in their chosen color. They also take a Village card which is placed into the third slot from the left beneath their Supply board. The leftmost Family token is removed from the player’s Supply board and placed into one of the huts on this card, untrained side up. The difference between the trained and untrained sides will be made clear later. Extraire du minerai, de l’or, déforester et polluer ? Ou vivre en harmonie avec la nature et tout faire pour accueillir les chauves-souris pour profiter de leur guano et ainsi reforester ?Any resources gained from your Supply board will always be placed into your tableau, but there are some very specific placement rules. For starters, Family tokens must always be placed into empty huts, untrained side up. So, if you don’t have any empty huts, you cannot gain anymore Family tokens. That’s the easy one. It’s not often a board game makes me want to learn German, read a book about its theme, and wish more games had bat meeples, but Atiwa, Uwe Rosenburg’s newest big box game, does just that. Atiwa is a worker placement game for 1-4 players that will take 60-90 minutes per play. Gameplay Overview: The shifting tiles add variability by covering up placement spots, but also revealing new ones. is a huge forest reserve with 17,400 ha of evergreen forest, which is rare even for Ghana. There are also mineral resources here, such as gold, diamonds, white alumina and bauxite. But that is not what this game is about. Zeitgeist, entre fabrication locale, éco-conception et thématiques écologiques, avec Atiwa, et d’autres, on sent que la catastrophe climatique, et environnementale, saisit de plus en plus le marché du jeu de société. In this game, you will develop a small community near the Atiwa Range, creating housing for new families and sharing your newly gained knowledge on the negative effects of mining and the importance that the fruit bats have for the environment. You must acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and make your community prosper. The player who best balances the needs of their community and the environment wins.

This circle of life—trees grow fruit which the bats eat, man cuts down trees to make room to live, bats excrete seeds to grow more trees which begets more fruit which begets more bats—is central to the theme and mechanics in Atiwa*. Each player begins the game with a small village populated with just a few people. Over the course of the game, players will begin growing their village, family by family, bat by bat, in an effort to expand their holdings and score more victory points than their opponents. After a player has performed an action they can, optionally, perform the fruit bat action, but only if they have 1) at least three fruit bats, 2) at least one fruit in their tableau, 3) at least one tree left on their supply board and 4) at least room for one tree. The player can take the three fruit bats from their tableau and move them to their night card, spending one fruit and taking one tree. As you might expect, Atiwa is a worker-placement game. Each player only has three workers to place, and there are a lot of things you’ll want to do, so there’s some strategy needed. The bats I mentioned are at the heart of the action. Developing your community’s tiles gives you space to add family buildings, and there’s space for goats and wild animals to flourish (people have got to eat), and areas where trees grow. Trees grow fruit on them, and at the end of each turn if you have three or more bats on your boards you can ‘pay’ a fruit to send them off for the night, leaving your board for the round, but growing a tree elsewhere. A look at a player tableau, late game. The first thing that strikes you about Atiwa is the image of the fruit bat on its cover. He hangs there suspended upside down from the upper fame, an orange nestled within the folds of his wing. It’s an odd image if you don’t know what it is you’re looking at, as was the case with me the first time that I saw it. Breeding – look at the current round space on the main board where there are 3 icons. If you have at least as many things as shown, gain exactly one more of that type.

End of the Round

And so, ATIWA another I want to do everything but I will never have enough of anything game from a master euro-game engine builder. Decisions promise to be deliciously dilemma heavy. There’s tableau building, worker placement, hand management, variable player powers, resource management, end game bonuses – a big box of mechanics to balance. And there are going to be times when your engine will roar like a lion, and others when it will splutter like an old hog. All as a direct result of choices you make during the game (no pressure!). Atiwa est du « pur Rosenberg ». On y retrouve tous ses « poncifs », sa patte : placement d’ouvriers pour obtenir telle ou telle ressource (arbre, fruit, or, villageois, nouveaux terrains, chauve-souris), et « couteau sous la gorge » pour nourrir sa population, ses ouvriers. Jusqu’ici, rien de bien neuf sous le soleil.