Arigato

• Designer: Melodye Ladrat, Florian Sirieix
• Publisher: Ludonaute
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 10+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

All the villages in the land are bustling with excitement as in just twelve days, it will be the Shogun’s birthday! Gather your best artisans, craft magnificent offerings, and deliver them on time to earn his favor. Arigatō is a strategic and competitive card game in which you play as the leader of your village and try to combine the best artisan cards to claim victory. 

To start the game, shuffle the deck of 100 cards and place the deck face down on the table. Construct the calendar with the two double-sided pieces; you will have different objectives based on how you put it together.  Each player gets a village board, a palace gate board and 4 offering tokens. Each player also gets a starting hand of 5 cards

Each of twelve rounds consists of three phases, all of which are played simultaneously:

Dawn: In every round but the first, you will draw 3 cards from the deck and pick up the 2 cards left to you from your right opponent from the previous round.  Secretly choose the role of each of your five artisans in hand: one resident, two travelers, and two crafters.  

• Resident – is placed around your village board, but the chart at the top of the card tells you where it can be legally played. You may need to empty the space in order to place a new card.  If the previous card had an offering token on it, you place the card under your palace gate and will keep the favor points for that card.  If there is no offering token on it, it is simply discarded.  As you are placing cards in your village, be sure to sum up the total of favor on the four cards. Each time you reach or cross a multiple of 10, you immediately gain 2 Items of your choice.
• Crafters – these will be discarded to gain the items shown in the upper right
• Travelers – these go face down near your left hand opponent; they will get these cards in their next hand

Day: Reveal your artisan cards and collect the objects provided by the producer artisans. Trigger the effects of your resident artisans, if applicable, as seen on the stripe at the bottom of the card. Manage your objects and try to gather those required by your residents to prepare offerings for the Shogun – you may do these as many times as you like

• Trade 1 pair of items for any other item
• Prepare the offering of one of the artisans in your village by discarding all the items shown on the left side of their card
• Send an artisan to the palace – If a card had an offering token on it, you place the card under your palace gate and will keep the favor points for that card. 

Dusk: Execute any dusk actions on your villagers (denoted by an hourglass).  Check whether you’ve fulfilled the Shogun’s whims for the day – gain an objective token if you have fulfilled the objective of the day (see the calendar board).  Discard down to 7 items.

In the final round, you only assign 1 resident and the other four cards in your hand are all craftsmen.  You gain the 4 items in the Day phase and then carry out your actions as normal.

After twelve rounds, the player who has accumulated the most favors — which are earned through offerings, effects, and objectives — wins.  Points come from:

• Objective tokens collected
• Cards placed under your palace gate
• Favor tokens gained from artisan effects during the game

My thoughts on the game

So, as I’m teaching the game, I kinda chuckled when the solo rules came up pretty much right after setup.  After playing the game, this seems entirely reasonable, as Arigato is essentially simultaneous solitaire. Sure, there is a little bit of interaction with the passing of cards for the next round, but it’s truly minimal – and from my standpoint, whether i get two cards at random from the deck or two unknown cards from my RHO – it’s still all the same.

As you might guess, I’m not bothered at all by the solitary puzzle here – in fact, I like it.  Just let me work on my own little area, trying to maximize my resources, score cards, meet goals, etc.  I do like the challenge of figuring out what to do with your cards: gaining the needed resources, playing cards in particular places (or perhaps leaving cards in your village that are providing you rewards), etc.

One other area of possible indirect interaction is the goal completion.  There are 10 rounds in the game where you can complete the goal, and the arithmetic scoring chart truly rewards you for doing this as many times as possible.  For me, it’s more about being close to the lead on this – as you don’t want to lose a large amount of points on this scale.  Of course, if you work towards meeting the goal criteria, you could really hamper your progress in other areas – so keeping an eye on what other people are doing is at least one indirect way that your opponents can influence your play. 

Each round, you’ll have to solve a little optimization puzzle – how to use those 5 cards as best as you can – and that’s the sort of game I can get behind.  Having played it multiplayer, I’m really not sure if there is much added by the extra people other than the camaraderie and company of others, but no matter, I still enjoy the game.   It takes a bit longer to play, but such is life.  For those looking for a good puzzle with a Japanese theme, Arigato is a great game for you.

As a note, Arigato is the swansong for Ludonaute Games – they are closing down and their principals are moving in a different direction.  The company has always made interesting games, probably best known for Colt Express, the SdJ winner.  For sure, I will miss the people behind Ludonaute as well as their games.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Joe Huber (1 play, online): I was curious about this game, so I took advantage of the opportunity to try it out on BGA.  Which means that my thoughts should be taken with even more grains of salt than usual; in my experience online play is nearly always inferior to in person, and that’s particularly true when learning a game.  That said, we enjoyed the game well enough, and I’d be open to trying it in person – it just didn’t strike me well enough to have sought out a second play.  I do wonder if I would have had a more positive reaction to an initial in person play…

Doug G (3 plays): This was one of the first two games Shelley and I purchased in the lead up to Essen 2025 and it did not disappoint. Dale’s description of the need to ‘solve a little optimization puzzle’ is correct, and worked well for both of us. I’m sad to see Ludonaute going away, but this is a nice final game to round out their catalog. We did a video review here: ​​https://youtu.be/EG8CRCPsjNQ as well as discussing it on Episode 1016 of our podcast: https://traffic.libsyn.com/garrettsgames/GarrettsGames1016.mp3

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale, Doug G.
• Neutral. Joe H.
• Not for me…