Edo

In Edo, players represent daimyo in mid-second millennium Japan who are trying to serve their shogun by using their samurai to construct fortresses, trading posts and houses in Tokyo and surrounding areas. At the start of Edo – which won "best evening-length game" in the 2010 Hippodice Game Design competition under the name Altiplano – each player has five samurai tokens and three square authorization cards, each of which has four possible actions on it. One card, for example, allows a player to: Collect rice (up to four bundles depending on the number of samurai applied to the action), Collect 5 ryo, i.e. money (per samurai), Collect wood (up to four, with one samurai on the action and one in the forest for each wood you want), or Build (up to two buildings, with two samurai on the card and one in the desired city, along with the required resources) Each turn, the players simultaneously choose which of the four actions on up to three of their cards they want to take and in which order, programming those actions onto their player boards. Players then take their actions in turn order, moving samurai on the board as needed (paying 1 ryo per space moved) in order to complete actions (to the forest for wood, the rice fields for rice, cities to build, and so on). Some actions allow free movement, and others allow a player to recruit additional samurai beyond the initial five or deploy more of them onto the game board. One other action allows you to gain additional authorization cards from an array on the side of the game board, thereby giving you more cards from which to choose your three actions from for the rest of the game. Building in cities costs resources and gives you points as well as money; as more players build in a city, the funds are split among all present, with those first in the city receiving a larger share. Players can also buy points or resources by dealing with the traveling merchant. Once at least one player has twelve points, the game finishes at the end of the round, with players scoring endgame bonuses for money in hand and other things. The player with the most points wins. Edo includes separate game boards for 2-3 players and for 4 players.