Designer: Nao Shimamura (シマムラナオ)
Artist: Yamauchi Rock Boy (ヤマウチロックボーイ)
Publisher: ハレルヤロックボーイ (Hallelujah Rockboy)
Players: 1-100
Ages: 10+
Times Played: 14 on a purchased copy
This will be a sort of review of a game I first reviewed in April of 2020. I’m writing this as an updated “review” of the game (and will skip most of the detailed rules here), but there are a few things you should know before we get started. It is scheduled today because I helped license the game for Allplay (boardgametables.com) and they are launching it on Kickstarter on Tuesday, under the new name and theme, Mind Space. I will financially benefit if you back it.
This is my favorite roll and write game.
At first glance, it has many of the colored polyomino tropes which pervade the space, but it separates itself from the crowd for me – both in mechanics and in theme integration.
In theme, the game takes place over 12 months of college, and for each month, you’d draw one shape in your tatami door room. The shapes you can choose from are mostly the polyominoes you would expect, but they arrive on a conveyor. There are always 5 shapes available, with a 6th as a consolation prize of sorts. Each month, dice are rolled for the five colors used in the game and assigned to certain positions of the conveyor. At the end of the month, the shape in the 5 slot is removed, the others slide down a position, and a new shape is added to the 1 slot.
As I think about it now, I didn’t properly couch my original discussion of the game in enough of a modern sports analytical lens. There’s a certain WAR aspect to considering the 12 shapes you’ll draw during the game. For each yellow shape I draw, I’m _not_ drawing something else. What are the best food pyramid proportions of each color? It’s not that easy of course – maybe it’s 1 yellow, 1 blue, 1 red, 3 orange, and 2 purple, and 4 green. But what happens when the reality of that hits the conveyor?
In the original review, I glossed over it, but I had a friend who thought the yellow shapes were categorically never worth drawing. I’m not involved in any of the art, theming, development work, etc. that Allplay does, but occasionally a question comes back to me. They too had a question about the yellow shapes (now green, but I’m still going to call them yellow for the purposes of this article).
So I threw all of the score sheets I’ve kept into a spreadsheet and looked at the correlations between how many times shapes were drawn, the points the player earned from them, from the bonus cards, and overall scores.
The game will always give you a way to score points – even a yellow shape which doesn’t directly provide points will cover up spaces which would otherwise subtract from your score. But when I inevitably must veer off my personal ideal course, what is the swap I’m making? How do I maximize the switcheroo. Which color will get less shapes.
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