Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Ever since I slept on Bestiary of Sigillum: Collector’s Edition a couple years ago, I decided that CrowD Games should be closer to the top of my list of favorite publishers. As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time with their catalog over the last two years, playing through every single game the team at CrowD would send my way.
With very limited exceptions, CrowD has always delivered the goods…and with the recent fulfillment of the medium weight strategy title Nippon: Zaibatsu (based on the 2015 game Nippon), I’m ready to shout it to the masses: people should be following CrowD’s every move.
About a year ago (around the time that the original Zaibatsu campaign went up on crowdfunding platforms), I began playing Nippon on Board Game Arena, mainly to see if this was the kind of game I wanted to back when the campaign for Nippon: Zaibatsu went live. I liked what I saw out of the 2015 original, enough to put down some money for a copy of Zaibatsu.
Then, life punched me in the gut. I was laid off from my full-time job, and I shut down any talk of backing not only this game, but buying any board games for a few months. (It’s hard to justify leisure purchases when you don’t have an income, right?) But I followed the campaign with interest, and I used my newfound free time to play Nippon online.
The 2015 version of the game is pretty good, although I’m the first to also admit that the BGA implementation of the game is a little bumpy. (Undo button, anyone?) But aligned with my Nippon experience was my mostly solid experience with Asian Tigers: A Story of Prosperity, the previous game by the same designers, Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro and Paulo Soledade.
Like Asian Tigers, Nippon is an action selection game that is triggered by the color of the worker that you choose from a market of six different choices. And, like Asian Tigers, Nippon can be brutal when players don’t lean into the area control scoring that takes place at certain phases of the game.
Unlike Asian Tigers, Nippon’s new version (named after the conglomerate boards each player manages for their production empire) has a mostly exceptional rulebook and a stellar production, be it standard or deluxe editions. This, mixed with new gameplay elements that have made the original Nippon obsolete in my world, means one thing:
Nippon: Zaibatsu is my frontrunner for game of the year.
Actually, I DO See Color
Nippon: Zaibatsu is an area control, variable round strategy game for 1-4 players. For this review, I played Nippon: Zaibatsu three times: at one, three, and four players. The game scales well to all player counts.
Each player manages a conglomerate of different companies during the Industrial Revolution (this was defined as the Meiji Era during the first Nippon). The player boards here initially feel a bit complex, but after even a couple rounds with the new setup, I felt right at home. Players use their boards to track the various factories in their conglomerate, which can come in as many as six flavors: cotton, paper, bento, lenses, bulbs, and clocks.
The boards also have three tracks to consider: R&D (known as “Knowledge” in the base game), Mining, and an income track. There are spots for six workers—just like the base game—but maybe the most important change from the 2015 version to now comes when considering the worker colors when drafting a worker to take an action.
On a player’s turn, they must either take a worker and one of the actions below that worker’s hiring space, or consolidate, the catch-all term used here to clear workers, pay salaries, collect coal, and take other bonuses. When players took a worker in the original game, the color only mattered when paying salaries later, as each unique color on a player’s worker track would cost them 3,000 yen in salaries.
This could become disastrous early on, because when players took, say, three different colors of workers before consolidation. With an income of only 12,000 yen, that meant a yield of only 3,000 yen to start a new round after paying 9,000 yen in salaries. (This also means players get to lament taking on a third or fourth color of worker by screaming to the sky every time it happens, which continues to be a gift that keeps on giving!)
Nippon: Zaibatsu still requires players to pay the 3,000 yen per color, but makes a change so subtle I’m ready to call it genius. In Zaibatsu, the first worker drafted always grants a player a bonus, based on the color of that worker. Could be money. Could be iron, critical for the production of ships and trains. Silk, a new resource, is a wild resource that can be turned into cash or used like the tokens from the base game that grant a player increased, but temporary, knowledge to build better factories.
But players don’t get that bonus until they consolidate. An additional sweetener: as long as a player drafts 4-6 workers, they will also get a bonus based on the final worker placed before consolidation…as long as the last worker is a different color than the first worker.
This alone makes Nippon: Zaibatsu so rich, and so much more interesting than its predecessor without adding much, if any, additional downtime. I was fascinated by this change, and even when I read the rules the first time, I didn’t think it would be as interesting as it ended up being during gameplay.
And there’s so much more. The ships action is different here, and now grants ways to increase the bonuses earned through worker color choices AND spikes the ability to consolidate faster, with an increased number of workers in the worker row. The Favor tokens replace the bonus tokens from the base game, by giving players three tiers of scoring based on how well they do across eight different tracks: the three I mentioned before, plus total factories, total contracts, trains, machine tokens, and ships.
And all that is tied to the best part of both Nippon and Nippon: Zaibatsu—the timing considerations aligned with the game’s area majority structure.
In both games, figuring out the best moment to trigger hiring space refills is critical, because placing influence tokens on the main board’s four regions to squeeze out competition is the main way to score points. Placing tokens to either cover the pre-printed values or bumping an opponent’s tokens with your own tokens of higher value is critical; it’s interesting, and it’s a blast, often in both directions. Losing a token might give you a chance to place that token in another region later, and placing tokens grants one of five different bonuses (coal, silk, cash, iron, or points) for each token dropped during an action.
Going last in an area control game is crucial, but for most of the game, it can be hard to determine when “last” is going to hit, because of the way new workers flood the hiring market at the end of certain rounds.
Oh My Goods-Ness
Nippon: Zaibatsu is incredible…of course, I thought Nippon was pretty good, so kudos to the game’s designers for polishing some of the so-so elements and turning everything into a positive.
That starts with the production. CrowD and its team crushed this thing, with only one minor miss: the cardboard money tokens are sort of weak when compared with the screen-printed wooden tokens used for goods (cool-looking crates that fit neatly underneath each factory on the player boards), the fancy insert, the double-sided factories, the cute influence tokens that clearly call out who is the front-runner in each region.
In that way, it feels like CrowD should have just made everything in the deluxe (Emperor’s) edition of the game truly deluxe. As it is, it’s strange that the money tokens look ordinary compared to everything else.
Those double-sided factories? They are only included in the Emperor’s edition of the game meaning that you should splurge and only consider the deluxe edition if you are going to commit. While I’m not sure these factory tiles would have really cost more to produce (from my limited knowledge, I’m sure there would have been a boost to the bottom line cost but one that I think most players would be fine absorbing), I think the double-sided factories are worth the extra coin as a consumer, especially if you do multiple plays.
The “B” sides of the factories shake up the options from game to game, and given that I am already looking at more plays of Nippon: Zaibatsu in the weeks ahead, I appreciate having some options here. This also keeps players from playing the same way each time out.
The rulebook doesn’t do a great job of calling out how workers refill the market, particularly in the final three rounds of the game, but then the back of the rulebook does a better job of this than the description in the rulebook. (The forums on BGG are already alive with chatter about this, so feel free to go there to enjoy it, too.) That said, the player aid is excellent, and I now use that to teach the entire game to new players. The menu of factory bonuses on the flip side of the aid keeps players engaged as they shop for new ways to attack the game.
I have been desperately looking for holes in this design, but I’m struggling to find any. The timing considerations, the worker drafting decisions, the variability in both setup and factory options during play—there’s a lot to like here, especially with a game that provides solid heft in its player choices.
Nippon: Zaibatsu is a solid medium-weight strategy game, and it plays in about 30 minutes per player, even with new people at the table. It can be cutthroat and it plays fast, two things I look for in games of this type; this is definitely not a Euro with zero player interaction. If that’s the kind of thing that turns you on, give Nippon: Zaibatsu a look!
