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The sub-tropical climate and environment of Taiwan makes the island highly suitable for cultivating top quality tea. But it wasn't not until the 19th century after English businessman John Dodd discovered some amazing Oolong tea there that the Taiwanese tea business truly begin to bloom and "Formosa Tea" became world-reknowned.
In Formosa Tea, players are tea farm owners competing to harvest the best tea leaves, improve their tea processing techniques, and produce tea of the highest quality for not only the domestic market but also for the international market. With the unique worker placement and worker advancement mechanisms, along with the tea dehydration and scenting processing, players must use their workers wisely to make the best tea in the market.
A game of Formosa Tea is played in four rounds. In each round, players take turns to perform one of the five possible actions:
Send a worker to harvest tea leaves
Send a worker to a tea factory to process tea leaves
Retrieve a worker from the tea factory after tea processing is completed
Send a worker to sell tea in the domestic market
Send a worker to sell tea to international merchants.
After the end of the fourth round, the player who has the most prestige points wins!
- Unique integration of worker placement with a worker-advancement mechanic tied to tech tracks
- Thematic fidelity to tea processing steps (withering, heating, rolling, oxidizing, drying, infusing)
- Engaging multi-step production cycle that influences scoring and market development
- tea production, processing, and trading
- Taiwanese tea plantations and the domestic/international tea market
- educational, process-forward overview
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- color/stacked resource harvesting — Harvesting can take either all cubes of the same color or one cube of each color from the space, influencing subsequent track progress.
- Compound Scoring — Final tea quality determines scoring; good or normal quality yields extra points.
- quality-based scoring — Final tea quality determines scoring; good or normal quality yields extra points.
- tea processing and quality management — Players process tea (oolong/black/green and scented varieties) on their boards, managing withering, heating, rolling, oxidizing, drying, and infusing to shape quality.
- tech track advancement tied to harvest — Whichever row the tea was harvested from grants advancement to players with a master on the corresponding tech track, equal to the number of workers in that row.
- worker placement — On your turn you place one worker on an unoccupied tea plantation space; the space dictates resource flow and triggers chain effects on tech tracks.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- This game has a unique worker placement and worker advancement dynamic.
- On your turn, you'll place one worker on an unoccupied tea plantation space.
- You'll be processing ulong, black, and green tea and manipulating their quality and dehydrating them on your player board.
- Whichever row the tea was harvested from, each player who has a master on the tech track in that row gets to move forward the number of spaces equal to the number of tea plantation workers in that row.
- It's a beautiful game and I love it.
References (from this video)
- Beautiful, painterly art with a refined color palette
- Deep and thematically cohesive tea production simulation
- Rulebook may require study and external references for mastery
- tea cultivation, processing, and distribution
- Taiwanese tea production; historical and culturally rich setting
- nerdy and detailed with a focused theme
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Resource management — Manage different teas with varying processing steps to fulfill orders.
- Worker placement / action selection — Players place workers to harvest, process, and fulfill orders for teas.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- It's like a board game summer camp at a hotel.
- You just get so much gaming in.
- Board game goals. I like that.
- It's always a lot of fun when you find the right people.