I was recently cat SaltCON in Layton, Utah, and got the chance to have both one of the best and worst experiences on a table. At the time I’m writing this, I’m holding off posting my awful, terrible, no-good experience of a game until our “Token American” writer, Tony, has a chance to play the same game (hopefully next weekend) and weigh in on it himself. I honestly hope he has as great of an experience as I had with Atiwa. The main reason I bring up the bad experience is for some context; that game basically ruined my day. I was ready to go home at lunch as it sort of ruined my day. We played a few lighter games afterwards, but I was still just done. When a table opened up to try Atiwa, my friends were pretty insistent that we try. Well I’ll be damned if it didn’t improve my whole day like nothing else could have.
Even if you’ve never played one of his games, most tabletop gamers probably know several of designer Uwe Rosenberg’s games. I’m not going to list them here, if you don’t know you can look, but any game with his name on it is going to be great for whatever audience he has geared it towards. Atiwa (pronounced eh-dee-WAH) is no exception. The Atiwa mountain rainforest in Ghana, West Africa, is one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. Unfortunately, like too many delicate regions of our planet, it is under constant threat from human devastation. This is the inspiration for, and the theme of, the game of Atiwa.
Players all take on the role of a family of fruit farmers who need to build a symbiotic relationship with the local fruit bat population, while growing their own communities and doing as little damage to the surrounding ecosystem as possible. To accomplish this, players place their three workers on a considerable selection of actions. These are generally some combination of gaining land cards and/or gaining resources like bats, animals, fruit trees, gold, and/or increasing the size of your family.
I won’t go through the whole game, but I do want to talk about a few important mechanics and how they tie together and reinforce the theme. When you first gain a family, they are “untrained” and must eventually be “trained”. This connects the theme and mechanics in two ways. First is that “trained” families coexist alongside fruit bats, sharing spaces on the board. When the time comes to feed your families, untrained families can eat bats. Fruit bats are commonly hunted as a source of bushmeat, which is a major contributor to their dwindling real-world population. Galamsey mining is an environmentally dangerous process that poorer Ghanan families engage in with the hopes of finding gold on the outskirts of legal mines. This is another place where the trained and untrained terms come in. Trained families earn gold each turn, whereas untrained families can only hope they will find gold by drawing either gold or (more likely) pollution from a blind bag. If they draw a pollution tile it is placed in their player area, permanently rendering that space unusable. To bring this all back around, “untrained family” is not intended to be a derogatory term, but a near-literal analog to the real-life struggles of people living in Ghana. The entire game does the same.
Surprisingly, the game also comes with an amazing supplementary booklet, complete with proper academic citations, that talks about a lot of the points I made above and Uwe Rosenberg has even authored a full non-fiction book on the topic. (But sadly only in German, and my German is in no way up to that level.) The booklet is available as a free download, and I can’t recommend taking a few minutes to read it enough. Even if you are on the fence about the game, take a few moments and learn something we don’t hear about very often in the first world. But also, play this game.
You can find Lookout Games online at lookout-spiele.de/en or on Facebook at facebook.com/Lookoutgames.