Yumegari: Dream Shop | Board Game Review

0:00 Hey everybody, and welcome to a another Chairman of the Board review. Uh today we are talking about a game that I've been very fortunate to get an early copy of. They're very gratefully uh sent to me by uh Lucky Duck Games. Uh this is a Yumigari uh Dream Shop. So, this is a a pretty entry-weight spatial puzzle-style game. You know, one to five players. The box says 30 to 45 minutes to to play. And you know, I think that's him being a bit generous. I think you can get this played in 30 minutes quite comfortably every single time. At least that's the case uh in my experience. But, uh this is as I said a spatial puzzle game where you are trying to fill up your little board, which is a 5x5 grid. Fill it up with these tiles. Uh these tiles have two bits of information on them. They'll have a symbol and a color. And as you can probably predict, at the start of the game there'll be two goal objectives out there, one relating to the uh color, one relating to the symbol. And you're trying to place these, trying to adhere to those goal um scoring criteria as well as you can as the game progresses.

1:07 So, these could be things such as well, your biggest block of this color, or you want this symbol on the opposite side of the map mirroring each other, or maybe you want to be in diagonals, or for every you know, you get more points based on how many you there are in rows or columns. These are things that we have seen uh before. You know, there's a lot of games like this on the market. But, the thing that makes Yumigari different to most of the other ones is the restriction on where you can place the tile that you have acquired. Uh the way that you're going to be acquiring the tiles is through a simple pass and draft system. You know, like close draft, pick the one you want, pass the rest to your neighbor. Uh in a two-player game it'll work a little bit differently where you have a bit more of an open draft. Um and the remaining one will be discarded. But, to be honest, this is a game where you can do a lot with freely um because the system is so simple that you can kind of maybe introduce any draft system that you want. But the according to the rules, those are what I described.

2:02 Um so, let's talk about that restriction. And the restriction for me is the bit that makes this game really stand out and makes it really enjoyable. So, this is the idea that you can only place your tile where your little familiar, you know, your little mascot is on your map. So, before every single tile placement, you can actually move your little guy around the map in just in an orthogonal way. It might be diagonal, I can't quite remember. Of course, you're trying to place him in the right place and then get the right tile in order to start building these patterns and so on. And there are nice little ways that you can kind of take shortcuts around the map by going through these portals and coming out of different areas to try and be as efficient as you can. But another really cool little restriction in this game is that you do only have ever have like 24 placements.

2:50 That's it for the whole game. And if your familiar is in ever in an area that you, you know, you're not going to place a new tile in, you're not on a blank space, then you're going to have to overlap an existing tile, which, you know, it could be for the, you know, the net gain, but of course, you could be covering up your previous good work. So, you do have to balance this income or your your cash flow of these movement tokens. Yes, you get one free movement per turn, but sometimes that is not just enough. And the way you get those movement tokens is by placing on certain specific areas on your board. Also, some tiles will have extra movement tokens on them. But as you can imagine, as that board starts filling up, all your different blocks might be on different sides of the map, meaning that you have to cover a lot of ground in a single turn to avoid any wasted turn. So, that's pretty much the the consensus of the game.

3:42 It's pretty rapid-fire. I think it strikes that really nice balance of, you know, the rules getting out of its way and you can just focus on the puzzle, you you draft. What are you going to prioritize? How are you going to move your little dude around. Now, I think the the time investment of this game is is spot-on, really. Um I think maybe if you are going towards that 45 minutes to an hour, this would outstay its welcome, but the fact that you can play a, you know, a fully comprehensive uh spatial puzzle-style game comfortably within 30 minutes, I think that's a really nice little thing. Um you know, a nice little niche. And something I would say that probably is the one of the USPs, in my opinion, um for this game is, you know, not only those actual little twists that I mentioned about, you know, overlaying and moving your familiar around, but I generally found that a lot of these spatial puzzle games are kind of tailored towards gamers as their as their kind of target market. Um so, maybe those kind of games, you know, I'm thinking of your your Calicos, your Cascadia's, you know, your um Forever Homes, those games are just have that little gaminess part of it turned up a little further than Yumi Ga Ri, whereas a game like this, you could pretty much play comfortably with with non-gamers without any issues at all because, as I said, the rules really do get out of the way of the fun and the gameplay.

4:58 So, I really do like that, and of course, this game is mostly played simultaneously with the other players because you are just passing, drafting, filling up your board. So, you know, as long as you're all moving at a sensible pace, then the game is going to um feel like it's always involved, always doing stuff, which is, you know, always a bonus for me. That seems to be a more of a kind of a trend in more modern board board game designs. They're trying to, you know, mitigate that downtime as much as possible, and Yumi Ga Ri does a great job uh of that. Uh the graphic design is super clean. There's no ambiguity in colors, symbols, uh which is normally a bit of a red flag for me because I am colorblind. I have no issues with this game uh whatsoever in terms of colorblindness. You know, the artwork's nice. The presentation's really good, and you know, this is a a prototype copy, um but I don't have any issues at all with the way this is being presented. Um every the way that explained, and it's one of those games that's just intuitive and as I said, the rules themselves get out of the way of where the fun lies. So, I'm really grateful that I got to play a copy this early. And to be honest, every single time I've brought this one out to the table, I introduced it to to people, they thought, "Okay, here we go, another one of these games. I tend to like them." But by the end of those games, they're thinking, "This game is actually really solid." Um, and we had a great time with that, especially because it is so brisk, I know, so quick to to resolve. And it kind of strikes that really nice balance of being easy to get into, but there's still enough game here. And you know, if you are starting to maybe wean your children off those kind of more child-centric games, and want to get them playing more, you know,

6:29 more involved games, this is a brilliant stepping stone uh for that reason, because there's enough here to satisfy you as a, you know, as a complete gamer, as someone who's played tons of games, but still younger audiences and can complete newbies to the hobby, um, are going to have a good time with this one as well, because they're not going to be confused about what they are doing. So, um, I think this one is launching sometime soon. I'm not sure if it's coming straight out to retail or um, Game Found or or um, Kickstarter. I will um, make sure to clarify that. Um, but again, if that sounds like something that you're interested in, again, that spatial puzzle that is very approachable, but still has enough going on, then Yumigari is a great option and something that I have been doing as well, which I can attest to, it does work, is that instead of the two base goals in the game, you can actually throw another one in for added complexity or added difficulty, so that you are spinning more plates and more scoring criteria at the same time. And it's always nice when you get that one tile placement that caters towards several goals uh with a single play. So, again, really grateful I got to play this one. Again, check it out if that one does appeal to you. Um, yeah, that's Yumigari by Lucky Duck Games.