Zeitgeist, entre fabrication locale, éco-conception et thématiques écologiques, avec Atiwa, et d’autres, on sent que la catastrophe climatique, et environnementale, saisit de plus en plus le marché du jeu de société. The perfect balance between flying foxes (another common name for fruit bats) and the growth of the farm is the key to success and thus victory in this classic worker placement game!

I honestly can’t think of even a single negative thing to say about Atiwa. The game play is top notch and the components are excellent. They even gave me plenty of plastic bags inside the box, so I can’t even grouse about that. It’s just an all around fantastic game. In fact, I think that out of all of the new games I’ve experienced over this past year, it’s probably my favorite one. And that all sounds grand – especially the prodigious pooping! But there’s always a trade-off. With limited space, the bats can’t have it all. You’ve got to factor in the needs of your people. It’s no use having lots of fruit bats but no village to house them. So you’ll be focussed on offsetting the negative effects of mining and bushmeat hunting by creating a bat boom whilst, of course, simultaneously enabling your newly founded settlement to thrive.

Gaining Resources From the Supply Board

As you might expect, Atiwa is a worker-placement game. Each player only has three workers to place, and there are a lot of things you’ll want to do, so there’s some strategy needed. The bats I mentioned are at the heart of the action. Developing your community’s tiles gives you space to add family buildings, and there’s space for goats and wild animals to flourish (people have got to eat), and areas where trees grow. Trees grow fruit on them, and at the end of each turn if you have three or more bats on your boards you can ‘pay’ a fruit to send them off for the night, leaving your board for the round, but growing a tree elsewhere. A look at a player tableau, late game. The Atiwa Range is a region of southeastern Ghana in Africa, consisting of steep-sided hills with rather flat summits. A large portion of the range comprises an evergreen forest reserve, which is home to many an endangered species. However, logging and hunting for bushmeat as well as mining for gold and bauxite are putting the reserve under a lot of pressure. Next, each player receives a Supply board along with eight Wild Animal, thirteen Tree, eight Fruit, thirteen Family, and seven Goat tokens which are placed on top of their matching spots. Each player also receives a Night card, one of each Overview card, and the Worker meeples in their chosen color. They also take a Village card which is placed into the third slot from the left beneath their Supply board. The leftmost Family token is removed from the player’s Supply board and placed into one of the huts on this card, untrained side up. The difference between the trained and untrained sides will be made clear later. In the work phase, players will be placing workers to perform a variety of different actions such as gaining new resources (from their supply board), acquiring new terrain and location tiles (to build up their tableau) and spending resources. Resources (fruit, wild animals, goats and trees) are taken from your own player supply board and new terrain and locations tiles are placed below your player board. Tiles will depict a range of different icons ranging from the above mentioned resources to bats to houses. The shown resource can be placed on the respective space. There are some basic placement rules about placing resources, wild animals and bats in certain locations which I will not go into detail here.

Ditching the cards was the genius move from Uwe with this game. Without having to manage a hand of cards with various professions, skills, bonuses or what have you, it leaves you free to concentrate on the table in front of you, and in turn it makes it a much more accessible game. I took Atiwa to my local game group and played with three others who’d never even touched an Uwe Rosenberg game before. Within one round, everybody understood what was going on, and how to get what they wanted, more or less. For that reason alone it usurps Nusfjord from the top of my ‘ easier Uwe worker-placement game to teach to a group‘ list. It’s a pretty niche list, granted, but that position is a lofty one. The Atiwa Range is a region of southeastern Ghana in Africa consisting of steep-sided hills with rather flat summits. A large portion of the range comprises an evergreen forest reserve, which is home to many endangered species. However, logging and hunting for bushmeat, as well as mining for gold and bauxite, are putting the reserve under a lot of pressure. Another aspect that I enjoy is Atiwa is your supply board. You have your own personal supply board that you remove and add resources to as your progress through the game. Balancing this and managing your resources is very compelling. The more resources you remove the better rewards, but as you spend resources they re-populate your supply board. I love this mechanism and it is so simple. To start off, let me say that this game is very much on the lighter end of the Uwe Farming Worker Placement spectrum. That alone might tell you how you’re going to feel about this. Unlike some of the other UFWP games, this one has a pretty streamlined scoring system. Sure, everything kinda scores something in the end, but the bulk of the points come from the village cards that you build and the families that you have raised. Set in a unique region of Ghana, Atiwa challenges players to manage a player board full of resources and build up their personal play area with new location and terrain cards to store these resources. At first glance, Atiwa’s main board will remind players of an earlier Rosenburg game, A Feast for Odin, with its myriad of worker placement spots. It can be overwhelming at first, but the choices here are simpler, much to the game’s credit. For a bit of variability, 6 of the worker placement spots are randomized at the start using tiles, which also slide to the left each round to cover up old spots and open up new ones.Breeding – look at the current round space on the main board where there are 3 icons. If you have at least as many things as shown, gain exactly one more of that type. If it isn’t obvious by now, I value a well-integrated theme more than clever mechanisms in my Euro games. In many Euros, theme can be an afterthought, added on during development to explain all the gears and levers the game is made up of. Not here. The designer wants you to know how important this theme is to him. So much so that the game includes a booklet about the Atiwa region including its history, geography, and people. I highly recommend players read this before playing. It also talks about the book that Mr. Rosenburg is writing about the Atiwa region and people, published in German only. Duolingo here I come! Players have a lot of choices but never enough workers. Final Thoughts: Just like that mayor, in this game, you will develop a small community near the Atiwa Range, creating housing for new families and sharing your newly gained knowledge on the negative effects of mining and the importance that the fruit bats have for the environment. Acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and make your community prosper. The player who best balances the needs of their community and the environment wins. Finally, a start player is determined by some means, given the Start Player marker, and you’re ready to begin. A Round of Play is a huge forest reserve with 17,400 ha of evergreen forest, which is rare even for Ghana. There are also mineral resources here, such as gold, diamonds, white alumina and bauxite. But that is not what this game is about.

ATIWA is a 1-4 player “advanced level” game based in the ATIWA region of Ghana and revolves around, you guessed it, building a new community! But this one has a fruity twist! You have seen a nearby area prosper as a result of harnessing the crop reseeding (aka pooping!) powers of the indigenous fruit bat population, and you want some of that action! You will therefore be tasked with establishing a village that exploits the eco-friendly relationship between fruit bats and farmers. Reforestation for roosting! Preservation for population growth! Poop for profits! Guano, for those not in the gua- know, is the accumulated fecal excrement of birds or bats. High in nitrogen, potassium, and phosphate content, it’s prized the world over as a fertilizer. It was also once highly coveted for its use in the production of gunpowder. However, with the introduction of modern day smokeless powders, gunpowder’s use (and, by default, guano’s usage therein) has sharply declined. Atiwa is a one to four player worker placement, resource management game, designed by Uwe Rosenberg and published by Lookout Games. Atiwa is a region in southeastern Ghana with steep-sided hills and flat summits. The region consists of evergreen forests and is home to many endangered species. The Mayor of the nearby town of Kibi is giving shelter to fruit bats in his own garden. The Mayor has recognised the importance of these species that sleep during the day and head out at sunset in search of food. These bats excrete the seeds of the consumed fruit and spread them across large areas. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Kibi, the mayor is causing a stir by giving shelter to a large number of fruit bats in his own garden. This man has recognized the great value the animals have in deforested regions of our planet: Fruit bats sleep during the day and take off at sunset in search of food, looking for suitable fruit trees up to 60 miles away. They excrete the seeds of the consumed fruit, disseminating them across large areas as the fly home: A single colony of 150,000 fruit bats can reforest an area of up to 2,000 acres a year. The graphic design and iconography is very well done. As we have played our first few games, the other gamers in my group (who did not read the rules on their own) were able to correctly interpret the icons on the player aids and the cards; this was very nice to see. And speaking of the player aids – though there are 3 cards worth – they pretty much explain everything that you need to know to play – and this really streamlines the experience.

End of the Game

Preparation: Discard any unselected Terrain cards and draw new ones to replace them. Then shift the Action tile to the right of the empty spot on the Action board one space to the left. Then the next round begins with whoever currently holds the Start Player marker (which shifts via the acquisition of Location cards). End of the Game I have now played Atiwa as a solo experience, with 2 players, and at the max 4 player count. At all levels, the game moves along briskly and is easy to teach due to the straightforward iconography and included player aids. I really liked the fixed economy that each player has on their personal boards and how moving one item off and onto your cards opened up income of another type during a later phase of the game. ATIWA, the new game by successful author Uwe Rosenberg, takes us to a farm in Ghana in West Africa. But it’s one thing to read about a concept in a book and an entirely different matter to actually experience it for yourself. And, let me tell you, Atiwa is an absolutely brilliant piece of game design. Mechanically, everything fits together like a cog in a well-oiled machine. There is zero fluff. And, despite how it looks on paper, it’s an incredibly easy game to teach and learn. And the noise that the new kid is making is a high-pitched squeaking noise. Look at the lovely little bats!

At first glance, you might think the board rivals something like A Feast For Odin in terms of action spaces to place your workers. In reality, the choices are much more simple. Many of the actions involve moving something from your supply board (goats, wildlife, trees, families, fruit) to your village spaces, usually by trading something else in return. The game’s economy is really easy to grasp. Above and below the main board are new tiles to add to your tableau, representing wild areas (things like grasslands, lakes, caves), or living areas such as villages and towns. Expanding your tableau with these tiles is essential as the game goes on. At the end of a game at my local games club. Atiwa has a relatively small footprint. Fruit bats – return the fruit bats from your night card. If there are not enough available spaces, return the rest to the supply Repeat this procedure for 7 rounds. At the end of the game, you score your area (using the included scoring pad to tally): In this game, you will develop a small community near the Atiwa Range, creating housing for new families and sharing your newly gained knowledge on the negative effects of mining and the importance that the fruit bats have for the environment. You must acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and make your community prosper. The player who best balances the needs of their community and the environment wins. Each player takes an action, then play passes to the next player. This process continues until each player has had 3 worker placements. Then there is a bit of maintenance.Atiwa is played over a total of seven rounds. At the beginning of the game, all the Action tiles will be in their rightmost positions. But, at the beginning of subsequent rounds, the leftmost one will move one space to the left. This has the effect of changing up the available actions from one round to the next. Each Action tile represents a single action of a two action structure: the action shown on the tile and the pre-printed action that is visible just beneath it. There are other stand alone actions dotted all over the board aside from the ones coupled to the Action tiles. In the game, you develop a small community near the Atiwa Range, where you creat housing for new families and share recently gained knowledge on the negative effects of mining! Not only this, but the importance that the fruit bats have for the environment. You must acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and make your community prosper. The player who best balances the needs of their community and the environment wins. When the game ends, players will add their points and then subtract any negatives they may have received from not feeding their families to obtain their final total. The player with the highest total wins. These points come from a variety of places: one point for each leftover gold; each tableau card is worth points; the rightmost uncovered spot of each Supply board row is worth the number of points printed on it; trained Families are worth a point each, and every Fruit bat in excess of ten is worth a point. Ties are broken by whoever has the least pollution. This player will earn 27 points (1+3+2+15+6) from their Player board.