Base price: $25.
2 players.
Play time: 20 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of Tokaido Duo was provided by Flat River Games.
I try to do thematic weeks occasionally; like in October, there’s Spooky Games week or the occasional Christmas-themed game around the holidays. For Valentine’s Day, I do err on the side of doing a bunch of two-player games, though that might be dicey depending on what your Valentine’s Day plans are. No judgment if you’re playing solo games or if you’re playing four-player games this Valentine’s Day as long as all involved parties are cool with it. If you’re playing six-player Dominion, though, this metaphor kind of falls apart, so don’t do that. Either way, let’s check out Tokaido Duo! It’s been a while since I’ve talked about Tokaido, so let’s find out what’s new!
In Tokaido Duo, both players are pitted against each other with one terrible goal: have the nicest time possible. Each guiding a merchant, an artist, and a pilgrim, you’ll move around, visit lovely temples and gardens, paint and gift paintings, and acquire and sell wares to move ever closer towards your goals. The more you do, the more you get, and the more you score. Just be careful! Your opponent can block you, at times, if you get too close to them. Will you be able to have a lovely outing in Japan?
Contents
Setup
Place the game board out in the center, first:
Give each player three Character boards:
Each player chooses a player color and places the divider on their side of the board:
Give them the player tokens in their color, as well:
There are Painting Tiles too! Shuffle them brush-side up and place them on the various spaces on the Artist Board.
Shuffle the Boutique Tokens and place them in the eight spots on the board:
Place the Ware tokens in the Cloth Bag:
Set the money and the gold slab tokens aside:
You can place the Wave Tokens on the board along with the Hot Spring Token:
Give the dice to the first player:
You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
A game of Tokaido Duo takes place over several rounds, as players move their characters around to collect wares, go on pilgrimages, and create and gift art!
Players alternate being the start player, and the start player rolls all three of the dice. They take one, perform the relevant action, and then the other player takes one, and then the start player takes the third one. Each die moves a character the indicated number of spaces, and you must move exactly that many spaces. Note that you can’t move through the same space twice in one turn.
Each character has different abilities, as well:
- The Artist focuses on painting. Each turn, when they move, they move through the zones in the center of the board. As their action, they can flip the top-left face-down painting for each character in or on the edge of the zone. They can, instead of flipping paintings, gift the top-left face-up painting and return it to the box.
- The Merchant focuses on wares. They can either move to the outer Coastal Town spaces to sell wares or move to the inner Mountain Town spaces to gain new wares. That said, they can only hold a certain amount and move along trade routes on the board. As they do, they convert every set of 10 Money that they gain to a gold slab.
- The Pilgrim has the most to do. They move clockwise around the board, landing on spaces to advance the Temple or Garden Tracks, gain Wave Tokens for new Abilities, gain coins from Coastal Town spaces, or gain the Hot Spring token to use another action again. Things like that.
The game ends as soon as one of these things happens:
- A Pilgrim reaches the end of their Garden Track.
- A Pilgrim reaches the end of their Temple Track.
- A Merchant fills out their track with gold slabs.
- An Artist gives away their last painting.
When that happens, finish the turn by making sure all three dice have been used, and then the game ends. Players multiply their Garden and Temple Track points, add the points from the rightmost filled space on the gold slab track, and add the bottom-rightmost uncovered painting tile on their Artist Track. The player with more points wins!
Player Count Differences
As I promised, this is two-player week for Valentine’s Day. So no player count variations here!
Strategy
- I don’t think this is the kind of game where you can necessarily rush the end successfully against many players. I find that rushing the end of the game is usually a pretty easy strategy to beat, since it relies on a player almost always doing one specific action with a specific character and almost always is to the detriment of the other characters. This means that if you get enough points with the other characters or just deny them access to the character they want to rush with, you’re probably going to slow them down enough that you do alright.
- You definitely don’t want to completely abandon any character. It’s pretty useful to get points with everyone, and doing that puts you in a position where you can almost always make some progress on your turn.
- Think strategically about where your opponent wants to go, then try to deny them that. You can kind of just get in their way. Place your Pilgrim on the space they want to go to. Move your characters out of the range of their Artist. Camp your Merchant on the space where they’d get the most money for the wares they have the most of. It’s rude, but Tokaido is about blocking.
- Try to always have a backup plan. Your opponent is going to do the same things to you that you did to them, so make sure you’re planning for that! You should always kind of shoot for having two things you want to do on a turn in case you don’t have any shot at one of them. I find that’s the best way to make sure you’re continually advancing.
- The Artist is decent at usually having something to do, since they can almost always flip over a Painting or two. Don’t flip them all too early. If you flip them all early, you can guarantee your opponent is going to do their level best to leave you dice that can only go to spots where you can’t Give the Paintings away, which is going to end up being frustrating. That said, you ideally want to flip lots at a time, so whether nor not you have Paintings still unflipped might make it hard for you to flip those later in the game.
- Similarly, the Merchant can cycle Wares, but if you have too many of one type, you are telegraphing your goals to your opponent. Having 5+ water bottles is a great way to make a ton of money at once, but you also make it pretty clear where you’re planning to go, so your opponent can usually head you off, to some degree. Or they can at least make you work for it, which may sully some of the utility of spending multiple turns cycling for a specific Ware unappealing.
- Getting the Wave Tokens can be a huge boon, if you pull it off with a certain strategy. They do pretty useful things! They let you modify the Pilgrim’s speed, get more money per Ware or more Wares as the Merchant, and let you flip more Paintings or sell Paintings on spaces you pass through as the Artist. They’re essentially Variable Player Powers that you can just go seek out and pick up.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- A pretty solid distillation of the Tokaido experience down to two players. You basically get all of the same features (save the Inn), but in a faster and more compact package. Plus, the two player mode in the original game just uses a dummy player to effect a third player and that’s never my favorite thing.
- I do love, from a scoring perspective, games where players gain points on multiple tracks and then multiply them. It’s just a satisfying way to make sure that players are gradually advancing on multiple fronts, rather than doing one thing to the detriment of all the others. I like it from a design standpoint.
- I like the rock-paper-scissors balancing aspect of the three characters. It feels like Trieste, but without a third player trying to maintain the balance. You’re really just advancing and trying to balance three characters without letting one player run away with the score on theirs. Usually if you win two of the three characters’ scoring criteria, you win the game, though I’d be interested if a scenario exists where that isn’t the case.
- Plays pretty quickly when the dice are cooperative. You’re moving a good amount pretty constantly and getting thing done; I’m a fan. If the dice aren’t being helpful, however, the game can take a while, which can be annoying.
- I do appreciate that the three characters are each moving on fairly different axes that only sometimes overlap. It feels like three mini games on one board, at times, but in a way that’s interesting rather than just vague. I appreciate their various strengths and playstyles, though I think the Artist ends up being my personal favorite (just more interesting choices and balance).
Mehs
- A lot of the strategy here focuses on the Tokaido blocking, here used to give your opponent dice that they really can’t use at all. Blocking is fine, but it can be a bit annoying when it’s kind of the crux of the player interaction. Like, Istanbul does it to a certain extent, yes, but there’s little-to-no mitigation for it here in Tokaido Duo because your only other options are to try and go somewhere else or somewhere less valuable and both feel bad.
- Similarly, since the game is dice-driven, you can have multiple rounds where nobody rolls anything useful, so the game can drag a bit. We had one game where we rolled all 1s for several rounds, which wasn’t really what anyone needed, and then when we finally got out of that we rolled higher numbers that weren’t useful because we were now all so close to our goals. It was gently frustrating.
- If a player ends the game on the final die, it’s a bit of an unceremonious finale (the game just ends). Just always a bit odd when a game ends without a last round or a last turn for some players.
- While the randomized placement of the Boutique Tokens and the double-sided Wave Tokens add variety, I wouldn’t necessarily say that they change the game enough for me to say that they improve replayability. They’re just kind of a “slightly modified setup” so that you’re not playing the same game every time, I suppose. I do kind of miss more formal Player Powers.
Cons
- Another game where I feel like literally everything in the game could stand to be 30% – 50% larger. A lot of the components are just tiny, and that makes setup so much more frustrating. This is especially true of the Painting Tiles; they’re very small and they all have to be randomized face-down, which just ends up being annoying. A larger-box version of the game would almost certainly be more expensive, but it might be less unwieldy, too; I’m always worried I’m going to lose something.
Overall: 7.75 / 10
Overall, I enjoy Tokaido Duo! It’s sufficiently reminiscent of the original Tokaido, but does the nice thing of changing up the experience enough that both games can conceivably exist in a collection without one feeling redundant. I am generally a fan of the push towards having two-player versions of popular games, in no small part because I usually am playing games in a two player environment. Just the way it shakes out, sometimes. But I think, here, the interesting thing is giving players a nice rock-paper-scissors game to balance out, in that each round, they can always advance some (but not all) of their characters. Figuring out which to promote and which to hold back so that you can gain the points you need is the tactical side, and which character is going to be the crux of your strategy provides the strategic input to keep the game interesting. I will say I don’t love how physically small the game is; there are a lot of tiny cardboard tokens that you need to place on places with relatively high precision, which I don’t love. It just feels like the game could have been larger (though I imagine it would be consequently more expensive). There’s also a fair amount of blocking, but that goes back to the strategy of Tokaido, so if you already like strategic blocking, you’ll probably enjoy it here, too. If you’re a worker placement fan, this isn’t really a worker placement game, but it has a lot of the same energy around blocking, too. Either way, if you enjoy travel-themed games, you want a two-player competitive game, or you just want to revisit Tokaido, you might enjoy Tokaido Duo! I thought it was fun.
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