Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
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. Okay so there will be trouble. There’s always trouble. In Uwe’s intense games, someone is always at risk of starving or running out of room. And at Essen Spiele in October, the latest in his heavy-weight economic based building games is due to be launched by Lookout Games! Feeding – Look at the bottom two rows on your supply board. Subtract the number from the goat row from the number in the family row. This is your food demand. If this is a positive number, meet the demand by spending: goat=3 food, animal=2 food, fruit/gold=1 food, bats=1 food. If you cannot meet the demand, lose 2VP for each missing food – mark this on the score sheet. Income – For each trained family token, gain a gold. For each untrained family, draw a pollution token, gaining 0/1/2 gold as shown. Then, place these pollution tokens, going row by row, left to right on the cards; filling in all top middle spaces first, then top right, then second row, and so forth. If there is a token on a space that is filled with pollution, that token is lost. The pollution tokens are never removed, so this represents a permanent loss of space on your cards.
Uwe Rosenburg is well known for his farming and feeding your people type games. His games have been hit or miss with me in the past. Caverna is probably my favourite to date. The theme of Atiwa is what drew me in initially. I love the idea of a farming game where you are trying to work with nature to achieve your goals. So, how does Atiwa play? Lets find out. Not Really “Advanced”After a player has performed an action they can, optionally, perform the fruit bat action, but only if they have 1) at least three fruit bats, 2) at least one fruit in their tableau, 3) at least one tree left on their supply board and 4) at least room for one tree. The player can take the three fruit bats from their tableau and move them to their night card, spending one fruit and taking one tree. Dans Atiwa, vous développez une petite communauté au Ghana, tout en gérant les populations de chauves-souris. Passionnant, pertinent ! 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. Atiwa est du « pur Rosenberg ». On y retrouve tous ses « poncifs », sa patte : placement d’ouvriers pour obtenir telle ou telle ressource (arbre, fruit, or, villageois, nouveaux terrains, chauve-souris), et « couteau sous la gorge » pour nourrir sa population, ses ouvriers. Jusqu’ici, rien de bien neuf sous le soleil.
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. The game will proceed this way for seven rounds at which point players gain victory points for gold, terrain cards, resources removed from their supply board, trained families and fruit bats. Points are deducted for missing food. The player with the most points is the winner. Final Thoughts 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.
Gaining Resources From the Supply Board
ATIWA, the new game by successful author Uwe Rosenberg, takes us to a farm in Ghana in West Africa. Wild Animals, Trees, and Fruit: Take a look at your Supply board and gain the rightmost uncovered reward from each row, starting with the top row and moving down. Wild Animals get you trees. Trees get you fruit. Fruit gets you bats.
Repeat this procedure for 7 rounds. At the end of the game, you score your area (using the included scoring pad to tally): Atiwa is played over seven rounds, with each round consisting of a work phase in which players will take three actions, followed by a maintenance phase. 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!
End of the Round
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. But even that’s not cut and dried. Anytime someone adds to their tableau, they get to take the Start Player marker from its current owner. So, do you add to your tableau right now (maybe you need space to place a Goat, for instance) and risk having the Start Player marker taken away from you? Or do you hold out for as long as you can before adding to your tableau? If you wait until your third worker, you’ll be missing out on the opportunity to take that Goat. So, is getting your hands on the Start Player marker worth giving up that Goat over? It’s a lovely core mechanism. And you really feel the pain of taking actions with sub-optimal timing. It’ll come as no surprise to you by now that I love Atiwa. I loved it after my first play at Gridcon last year, and that love has only grown. Part of my love is because the components are so adorable, part of it is the ease of play, and part is of how streamlined it is. Solo will take you half an hour, then you can reset in a couple of minutes and go again (steady now!). How many games can you say that about? Time will tell, I’m sure, but as I write this now, Atiwa is my favourite Uwe Rosenberg game, just edging out Nusfjord. I’m sorry my fishy friend, I love you dearly, but these bats are just too much. Atiwa is a wonderful game. La phrase « Advanced Level » sur la boîte. Pour indiquer que le jeu est… complexe ? En réalité, non. Atiwa est beaucoup plus simple qu’il n’y paraît. Les règles sont certes denses, mais très claires. Et finalement très fluides. Avec des pictos extrêmement limpides et ergonomiques. On ne passe pas sa partie le nez dans les règles, et tant mieux !
On a player’s turn, they will place one of their workers onto an available action location, each of which can only accommodate a single worker, and then pay any associated costs before performing the action…or not. Players are allowed to place workers onto action spaces they have no intention of using if they choose to do so. And, players are not required to gain all the benefits from their chosen action location either. For example, if a player placed their worker on the space that rewards them with two Wild Animals, they could choose to take zero, one, or two animals. 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. Per the rules: “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. In general, the various action spaces will allow you to gain resources, expand your holdings, or upgrade your Families. Aside from gold, any other resources will always come from your Supply Board. Any Terrain or Location card gained must be situated orthogonally adjacent to any already gained card and they can never be placed in such a way that they extend beyond the edges of your Supply board. So, each row may only consist of four cards, but you can have as many rows as you’d like. For the sake of this review, we’ll refer to this collection of Terrain/Location cards as your ‘tableau’. 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.
A new Uwe Rosenberg. When will it be available?
Once the worker action is taken, you can take an optional fruit bat action – only if you have 3+ fruit bats, you have a tree on your board and you also have a space available for another tree. If so, place 3 fruit bats on your night card and then place a new tree on one of your cards. (This represents the bat’s nightly search for food, then their pooping out the seeds and the growth of a new tree…) You see, Atiwa is a game about bats. I mean, if you want to be pedantic, it’s about developing a small community in the Atiwa Range area of Ghana. But really it’s about bats. Loads and loads of outrageously cute bat meeples. I’m a little bit in love with the bats. As I mentioned above, Atiwa isn’t anything as like as heavy as A Feast For Odin, and while it’s lighter than Hallertau, there are plenty of familial traits passed down through its genes. It’s not often I walk away from a game thinking about its theme and wanting to research it even more. Atiwa is an important game because I truly believe it was designed to educate people about a threatened ecological region and what makes it unique. That it’s also a fun game experience makes for an easy recommendation from me. For fans of worker placement, you’ll love having a wide range of actions on each turn. For fans of engine and tableau building, you’ll agonize in deciding whether you should build out your terrain cards, providing space for valuable resources, or gaining those resources immediately to fill up your board and get more income later. As a hallmark of a good worker placement game, you’ll always want one more worker than you have. There are a couple of criticisms here as well. After several plays, it feels like the possibility of discovering new strategies is low. I fear that after a few more plays that this one may be relegated to being “solved” and become a bit samey. The solo mode scenarios should help with this at least. I also don’t love the graphic design choice of the main board and the terrain cards. It’s a long-running joke that Euro games can be all beige, but in Atiwa, various shades of brown and green really do the heavy lifting in the art department. I wish they had opted for some more vibrant art befitting the beauty of the Atiwa rainforest. That being said, I have enjoyed my time with Atiwa, but worry that the theme will overshadow the gameplay after a few plays. I can’t help but think that maybe Uwe Rosenburg meant it to be that way.
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