Ko-Compelling?

Board game design Stefan Feld is back -- with something I would never have clocked as a Stefan Feld game. Kokopelli is a card game for 2 to 4 players. In a break from most Feld designs, the rules are quite minimal, and the play time is short at perhaps 45 minutes. There's no track marking turn order or status. But I did find the game to be fun for its lighter complexity.

Players each start with an identical shuffled deck of cards: 10 sets of 3, plus 6 "wild" cards. Each turn, you get two actions from a short menu of choices: you can draw from your deck, exchange your entire hand for a new one, begin a new "ceremony" by playing a card to one of four empty spaces in front of you, or add a matching card to a ceremony.

That last option is where the strategic meat is. Playing the fourth card to a ceremony completes it, scoring points and removing it from the game. And you can add cards not only to your own four ceremonies, but to the rightmost two ceremonies of the player on your left, and the leftmost two ceremonies of the player on your right. In short, this is one of those games where you have to watch out that you don't set up an opponent to complete a scoring opportunity.

Of course, there's more to it than simply playing cards. Each of the 10 cards in the game has a special power while face up in front of you. One might score you a bonus point whenever you play a card into an opponent's ceremony. Another might score you a point whenever a wild card is played into any of your ceremonies. I say "might" because the game comes with more card types than are needed to play. Setup involves choosing cards (powers) at random and creating the specific decks you'll use for this game; interactions and strategy will change accordingly (much as it does in "fixed pile" deck building games like Dominion).

You always score at least 1 point when one of your ceremonies is completed, no matter who played the final card. But being the first or second player to finish a set of a given "suit" scores you a bonus. So there's an interesting tension between completing sets for bonuses, keeping sets open for the powers they'll give you, and trying to at least have a piece of any scoring opportunity that arises (even if you aren't the player causing it).

The game ends when one player draws all the cards in their deck, and then you simply tally up points to determine the winner. As I said, it's rather fast to play. And while it doesn't demand some of the deeper strategic thinking that so many Stefan Feld masterpieces do, I still quite enjoy the change-up here.

"Don't leave a great move for your opponent" games tend to be best at just two players, I think... but this one addresses some of those issues by forcing you to interact with just the players on your left and right. Because your deck contains 10 different powers, you can't just pick your favorite and reuse its power forever (as you can in a "stack deck-builder") -- you have to run through all your cards, and your opponents can play cards to close out any of your ceremonies they think are benefiting you too much. Put simply, there's some surprising depth here for a fairly simple rules set.

I'll need to play Kokopelli more (and experience more of its interactions between different cards) to get a sense of how much staying power it might really have. But for the moment, I'd give it a solid B+. It's a game I certainly want to play more of.