An eternal spirit and protector of the forest is reaching its final days - edging over four rounds towards its final ascension. Players (Bitoku) compete in the forest for Virtue Points to hopefully gather enough to be crowned both the new protector of the forest and the winner of the game.
Bitoku
Designer: Germán P. Millán
Publisher: Devir
Released: 2021
How to play:
At first glance this Euro style game can appear to be overwhelming - largely due to the board itself feeling more than a little busy. However, most of the items a player obtains during the game are stored on the main board rather than to the side and with that in mind the ‘playable’ area of the board is actually a lot smaller and less daunting as it may initially appear.
Infact each turn players take one of only three main actions:
• Play a ‘Yokai’ card onto your player board - take its action and unlock one of your three dice workers.
• Place an unlocked dice to one of five areas on the board - each area of the forest coming with its own particular focus, for example one area rewards you with resources which can be used to purchase things during the game, another area lets you move along a track to obtain points. The higher value your dice, the greater the action – and some rewards during the game allow you to increase the value of the dice.
• Move one of your already placed dice to its opposite space ‘across the river’ – this reduces the value of the dice which means future actions in other rounds may not be as powerful but lets you take a further action such as getting more powerful Yokai cards to play with for the rest of the game, getting access to ‘vision’ cards which give end of game point scoring opportunities to work towards, or obtaining ‘Bitoku’ cards – a set collection
….and that’s it. Play a card, unlock a dice, place a dice, move a dice across the river. Once you have played your three cards for the round, placed your three unlocked dice, chosen whether or not to move any of your placed dice across the river then the round is largely over give or take some housekeeping. Do the same for three more rounds and its game over.
General Headlines:
Ok, I’m perhaps making it sound like a very light, simple jaunt.
This game has a LOT going on.
The playing of your cards and the placement of your dice reveal options, and a LOT of options at that - Will I work towards set collection for the rest of the game? Will I instead try to gain resources so that I can build in the forest? Will I move along tracks? Will I try to do one of the other million things that this game probably lets me do?
It feels like the designer sat and made a list of everything that could technically go into a medium-heavy Euro and then decided to throw them all into the mix. So we have a little bit of deck building, dice worker placement, set collection, tracks, area control, engine building… I could probably go on. Now this isn’t a deck builder per se, nor is it an engine builder – it doesn’t do enough of any of its core mechanics for me to be able to give it some headline labels. It does all of them just enough.
If you are wanting a game with only one or two main mechanisms then this possibly isn’t the game for you. If you want a game that has a little bit of everything – a tasting menu of many mechanisms for you to use throughout the game then you are going to enjoy this a lot. There is arguably too much going on, however what this game does do very well is give you options of how to play it – and I like when the end of a game gives me that buzz of ‘next time I am going to AB&C, instead of XY&Z’.
I don’t want to label this as a point salad. Ok, it probably is a point salad but I think that label distracts from the fact that you cannot do a little bit of everything in this game - well, technically you could but it would be disastrous for your end of game point scoring where the bulk of your points will come (scoring set collection, buildings built etc). You have to choose 2, maybe 3 thing to really focus on in the game and do them to the best of your ability. And those things will change game to game. The volume of things that can be done in this game probably moves this closer to the heavy than medium end of the spectrum.
While it does have some very limited set up variability this is negligible. It’s the sheer volume of mechanics that gives this game its replayability – wanting to play it again and again but playing differently each time.
There is quite a bit of interactivity in this game too above and beyond other heavier Euros I have played - regular competition for spaces on the board, available cards, spaces to build, other resources that can be bought in the game. I can see this interactivity being a lot greater at higher player counts but even in the solo game I had many a moment of “don’t take that card DO NOT TAKE THAT CARD. Damn, it took that card” moments – or not being able to place a dice where I need to in order to work towards my strategy as the space was taken and then having to then pivot a little to explore other options.
Solo Headlines:
Players need to know that this is as far from a beat your own score or a simple ‘flip a card and just take a small and simple action’ as it gets. As the base game has so much going on and so many mechanics at play, the trade off is that the solo mode also has a lot going on too – indeed it has its own flowchart that each of its turns has to work through. “If A, then D or C but only if F and G equals P and if not then move on to the next step”. And there are about 10 steps.
The solo mode is superbly designed as you would expect from any solo mode with Dávid Turczi’s name attached. But it is highly involved and while it does mimic another player brilliantly, the cost is that its turns are quite likely going to take more of your time to manage than your own turns and I often found that this was making me lose focus on my own tactics and strategy.
After 2 or 3 plays the solo mode inevitably became easier to manage and understand but note that this does not make it an ‘easy’ solo experience. As a result of the work needed to run the solo opponent all of my solo games came in at the 2 hour mark. An enjoyable 2 hours, but with set up and tear down being quite heavy with this one then you’d need to plan in 2.5 hours at least from taking it off the shelf to putting it away. Personally, I like my solo games to play in 60 – 75 minutes. I don’t mind longer solo games (I'm looking at you Paladins), but I'm less likely to play them as frequently than something I can smash out in an hour but still feel like I have sweated through some good brain burn. This game doesn't feel like it outstays its welcome at all though - its an enjoyable 2 hour play. And possibly with even more honing of the solo bot I could get this time down a little - but I dont think by much.
At a Glance:
+ Visually sumptuous (nothing beige about this Euro)
+ Lots of different ways to play the game – so many different things to do.
+ At its core, only one of three simple to understand core actions to take each turn
+ More interactivity than some other recent Euro games of a similar weight.
- solo mode is however intensive to manage
- Game length of 2 hours solo may be slightly on the long side for some
- Sheer volume of mechanics might be off putting (for others it might be heaven in a box!)
Final Score:
7.5 out 10. (Reviewed after 7 plays).
Update February 2024:
How strange to be revisiting the very first board game review that I wrote almost two years ago. Its certainly a fair bit shorter than some of my more recent reviews, and in all honesty its probably a little more polite than some others too!
Bitoku stayed in the collection but it gathered dust on the shelf. I could certainly see that it was doing a lot of the things that I like in a mid-heavy Euro game and since the original review I have even gone on to very much enjoy the designer’s other titles Sabika and Bamboo (which has an excellent fan made solo variant on BGG, check it out). The truth is though I just could not enjoy Bitoku with the official solo mode. Its turns took longer than my own and I felt that they were more complex than they needed to be. I simply wasn’t having fun. Groan. I kept it in the collection however in the hope that I might revisit it at a later date and have a complete change of heart about the official solo mode or instead find a simpler solo variant that allowed me to more fully explore and enjoy what the game was clearly offering…
….and that day eventually arrived. I stumbled across the superb ‘Daitengu’ solo variant here and can only give a huge round of applause to how good it is. Minimal upkeep, chases strategic goals, quick, straightforward, yes, yes, yes. I wont go into too much detail about the (very straightforward) mechanics of Daitengu – I’m just popping back here after seven or eight plays of it to say “I think Bitoku is a brilliant game, I whole heartedly recommend the Daitengu variant whether you are trying the game for the first time or like me felt that the official solo mode was just a little too cumbersome.”
…oh, and I really like the Bitoku: Resutoran expansion - even if it did need a teeny tiny bit of house-ruling to make it fully soloable. It’s a small expansion (thankfully as the base game already has a heck of a lot going on) but what it did add was some enoyable, though inessential tweaks, variability and fun to an already excellent game.
Check out Daintengu though – it lifts this game to an 8.5 out of 10 for me.
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