That's Sama-gressive Gameplay

In board gaming, so-called "take that" mechanics generally lead to my least favorite kinds of games. These are games where players have to make their own gains by explicitly attacking an opponent, and specifically choosing that one opponent from the rest.

There are exceptions for me. It's hard to feel too slighted, for example, in a two-player game -- your opponent has no one to pick on but you, and so an attack is in no way arbitrary. Other games manage a brisk pace and simple decisions in a way that makes you feel like you still have a decent degree of control -- Potion Explosion being an example that I found fairly fun.

I mention all this so that when I tell you I did not enjoy Kami-Sama, you can take it with a grain of salt, knowing that some gamers enjoy this style of game a lot more than I do. But I'll also try to point out aspects of the game that I think would make even fans of the "take that" genre look to other games.

In Kami-Sama, each player takes on the role of a "Kami" (or spirit) exerting control over a region of feudal Japan. The tantalizing gimmick of the game is that it takes place on a circular board divided into quarters, and essentially set up like a Lazy Susan: at the end of each round, you rotate the board and wind up with a different section in front of you. An action point system lets you put shrines onto the board each turn, with the cost to act outside your current region much higher than just focusing on the quarter of the board in front of you. You score points in a variety of ways stemming from the positions of your shrines, doing the best you can with the region "passed" to you that round, and then hoping your position holds as that region passes to opponents on future turns.

If the simplicity of this core idea carried throughout Kami-Sama, I feel like it could have been a truly fun game. But there's a great deal of complexity layered on top of this. Each player is assigned a role to play, a Kami with unique and asymmetric powers. In essence, every player gets four actions they can take on their turn. Three of the four are always quite dissimilar to the actions any other Kami has available. It takes you a while to wrap your head around what your Kami can do, and it's essentially impossible for you to ever fully understand what all three of your opponents (in a four-player game) can do with their Kami roles. If you try, you'll be asking constant questions that just slow down the pace of the game.

This confusion in turn amplifies that feeling of victimization that often accompanies a "take that" game. It's one thing to be attacked by an opponent when there's a reasonable chance to have seen it coming. But in Kami-Sama, you'll never really comprehend all the ways you're vulnerable to the powers of your opponents. You all have the same scoring conditions, so you can grasp an opponent's incentive for coming after you -- you just can't easily know how they were able to do it until, too late, it's happening.

This mysterious and constant vulnerability might foster in some a relaxed attitude about being attacked. It's inevitable, and nearly impossible to anticipate, so just roll with the punches. But butting up against that is just how difficult it is to execute a turn in Kami-Sama. There are a lot of ways you can use your four powers, so many that the conscientious thing to do is to plan your turn ahead of time as best you can, to keep the game moving. But so much chaos can happen during your opponents' turns -- and, as I noted, none of it easily anticipated -- that there's simply no chance that the board you're looking at now will in any way resemble the board you face when it's finally your turn. You can't plan ahead; shrines will rise and fall, areas you thought you'd secured get conquered, and places you thought you could commandeer get reinforced. The middle of every turn you take is an "apology phase," where you say sorry to your opponents for how long you know you're taking to execute your turn.

Adding to the sometimes capricious nature of a "take that" game is an explicit "kingmaker" mechanic baked into Kami-Sama. One space in each of the four regions is, essentially, the tiebreaker space. Whenever two players control equal amounts of territory for scoring, the player in the tiebreaker space chooses who wins. Mind you, this is not just for ties involving that player -- it's for all ties in the region. Multiple times in a game, a player in a tiebreaker spot ends up deciding, say, second and third place between two of his opponents. It's a choice that always feel bad when you're on the losing end of it, and can even feel bad for the person making it, no matter what logic you might point to in defense of your choice.

Kami-Sama is a game where opponents must regularly hurt each other, and smile with indifference as they do it. When we tried it out in my group, by the end of the game, we'd taken to joking that Kami-Sama might translate to "go fuck yourself," the playful refrain you offer to your opponents' protests of being wronged. I believe the choices are too difficult, and the overall pace too slow, to satisfy players who truly enjoy "take that" games. Despite a clever idea or two at the core, it's a hybrid game not likely to be embraced by any fans of the constituent parts. I give Kami-Sama a D.