Harboring Some Thoughts

Yokohama is a board game in which players become merchants working to establish trade in a bustling Japanese harbor. The theme feels rather slight to me, though, perhaps holding up to a little bit of scrutiny, but mostly there to contain a series of "gamer's game" mechanics.

The "board" is made up of a series of tiles set up at random in brick style, in an upside-down triangle. A form of route building takes place on these tiles, with each player starting a turn by either placing two workers on one tile, or three workers each on different tiles. These routes of workers pave the way for the player's "president" marker, who must always move along a path connected by the player's workers, and must always end movement on a tile where no other president is positioned. Wherever you choose to land, that's the action you take. The magnitude of that action is determined by how many workers you've built up on the tile, and all those workers are removed again as you take it. So you're managing a constant ebb and flow, trying to plan ahead for actions you'll need.

Though it didn't occur to me at the times I played Yokohama, there are some superficial similarities here to the mechanics of Istanbul. Istanbul (with its "tower" of action discs) feels a bit more clever in its action-taking and movement, but Yokohama has more granular scoring, which I found to be a significant mark against Istanbul. Yokohama also throws in some other wrinkles -- contracts you need to acquire and complete, abilities you can gain throughout the game to let you skirt the rules, and more ways to score points and trigger the end of the game.

But all that nuance does come at a price: the time it takes to play. Both times I did, Yokohama felt to me like it took a lot longer than its not-super-complex rules set would suggest. True, new players were involved in those plays (including me the first time, of course), and that will always slow a game down. Still, this game's core mechanic does seem like a tough one for those susceptible to "analysis paralysis." I think it's that element of needing to build up workers on one tile over time so that, say, four turns from now, you'll be able to take a particular action to a large degree. It's a lot of planning, which you must do in several places at once.

I did enjoy Yokohama well enough, and I would play it again if brought to the table. Still, that sense of disconnect between its rules complexity and its play time feels like a bit of an issue to me. I'd call it a B+. I'd recommend it as a "better Istanbul," and to players who love Euro games in that "not quite abstract, but hardly awash in theme" space. But it's probably not a must-have for every gamer's collection.