- Publisher : Iello
- Designer(s) : Germán P. Millán
- Artist(s) : Edu Valls
- Players : 1–4
- Playing time : 120 Min
- Weight BGG : 3.74
What's this?
How do you play?
On your turn you must choose between 4 basic actions:
– Play a card from your hand on your player board and thus perform the action of the card and unlock the associated die.
– Place one of your unlocked dice on the main board to perform a forest action and possibly the action of a building located below.
– Cross the river with a die that has previously been placed on the board to perform actions or collect new Yokai or Bitoku cards.
– Or just pass
Strategic planning will be crucial, requiring careful anticipation of which cards to play to harvest specific resources, thus allowing the purchase of tiles, the construction of strategic buildings, and incentivizing other players to use them, thus generating victory points . Dice slots on the main board are limited, requiring clever timing management to wisely place your dice before your opponents.
The concept of optimal timing is also found when passing the dice on the board, an important decision to recover coveted cards. Likewise, on the pilgrims’ trail, you will have to advance your pilgrims at the appropriate time to reserve the best locations before the others. Drawing inspiration from Japanese folklore, Bitoku incorporates names of spirits from Asian myths, offering a strong artistic direction, although the game board can appear somewhat visually cluttered.
Is it good?
Bitoku is really excellent; It will take you a game to assimilate all the icons (and there are many), the different actions and the locations on the board, but after the second game, everything becomes crystal clear. Although Bitoku does not innovate in its mechanics, everything it does is well executed in a pleasant and fluid manner.
The only criticism I could make of it is that it forces you to play opportunistically without having the feeling of truly building something with a dominant strategy that one could develop. Nevertheless, in all cases, Bitoku remains a pleasant game, especially if you like the games in the Euro Expert range.
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Review Bitoku
Positives
- Complete and demanding expert game
- Several interesting mechanics
- A very pretty AD despite the visual overload
- The theme of Japanese folklore
Negatives
- Cardboard (too) loaded
- Having to do a little bit of everything
Breakdown
- Components and illustrations 9.0
- Mechanics 8.5
- Theme 8.0
- Replayability 8.5
- Handling 8.5
- Interaction 8.0
- Originality 9.0
