Samurai by Reiner Knizia

I wanted to recommend this game, and I waited some time for the devs to possibly fix it, but it's still broken. Single player works fine, but the multiplayer is broken. Not only does it just spin endlessly, it locks you out of the rest of the menu so you can't even go back to single player. And I don't want to just play a handful of bots forever. I would get a refund, but unfortunately I "spent too much time on it" to qualify for a Steam refund, even though a good chuck of that time was just trying to figure out how to get multiplayer to work. Discord was also silent on it. Update: Devs addressed the issue and multiplayer is now working.

The initial download did not load the multiplayer menu. Reached out to the designers, and they quickly updated the file. Thank you !!! This is a neat strategy game. And it is well executed. I'm glad I didn't give up on it.

Cool game. Not that easy :]

Swift as the Wind, Silent as the Forest, Fierce as Fire, Still as the Mountain. Takeda Shingen

faithfull adaptation of a wonderful boardgame

This is a perfect implementation of the boardgame with the same name. I LOVE IT! Learning the rules takes a few minutes, mastering the game takes, probably, a few months or years. There is 2, 3 and 4 player modes, against AI and against online players.

Classic Knizia! This is a simple abstract strategy game with a good variety of AI opponents. Most achievements are tied to beating the various personalities. With your limited assortment of placeable tiles, you are tasked with surrounding and capturing caste tokens, hoping to collect the most of each of the three types by the end of the game. Some of your tiles are caste-specific, some (like the eponymous Samurai) are wild, some are (wild) ships that must occupy sea spaces, and some are special actions that let you move or reuse pieces for a surprise attack. Aciton tiles and wilds can also have a special kanji on them that lets you play an additional tile in the same turn. I always find it hard to compare Knizia's games to other, more familiar games, but I'd say Samurai plays like a cross between the area control of Go and the suit-matching concept in Root.

Samurai is a semi-abstract game (you could say the strategy is closer to Chess than Risk) about collecting sets of goal tokens. You collect sets with tokens that match 1 of the 3 types, or with 1 of 3 wild suites: Samurai may be played as an extra action but tend to be lower value, Ronin may be played as an action but are worth more, and ships are an extra action outside of the normal play area. As soon as a goal token is surrounded, either a player wins it by having the most matching + wild tokens adjacent OR the goal token is removed from the game. I found Samurai to be extremely easy to grasp, the tutorial was brief and hands-on, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys more abstract-leaning boardgames. However, true abstract players may be put off by the randomized tokens that form your hand each turn. If Samurai sounds like Neuroshima Hex, that's because it's extremely similar, with the main difference being you're merely trying to surround objectives instead of worrying over combat or token facing.

Faithful recreation of the board game - it is a very fun puzzle to figure out! The last achievement is bugged, but this will hopefully be fixed in a future patch.

Fun game, now I don’t need to play board games alone :D