After another gushing post about Mottainai late last year, a friend on boardgamegeek responded.
I wasn’t really impressed by the couple of plays I had way back when but you make me think I ought to try it again.
Martin
This was my response:
To be fair, I wasn’t particularly impressed after my first couple plays of Mottainai. I remember trying the original print and play version and thinking this was a pale version of Chudyk’s earlier classic, Glory to Rome (GtR).
My recent infatuation with Mottanai has a bit to do with timing. I bought a copy of this game halfway into my season of exile between March and June of 2020. During that time I was playing quite a bit of of Innovation against myself, so I added Mottainai add some variety.
In this enforced solitude, it took several plays of Mottainai to banish GtR out of my head and grok this game on its own terms. At the same time, work got insanely busy so I went from primarily playing Innovation to focusing on Mottainai, because of the freshness of the new game and its ease of setup.
After work slowed down and I stopped traveling, I moved back in with the family. Now that I was with the kids again, I no longer had big blocks of free time. With little people running amok, I could only sneak in a hand when circumstances permitted. Thus, the simple single deck shuffle went from being a convenient amenity to a killer app feature.
This game is definitely an acquired taste. There is no sugarcoating the convoluted flow for such a short game. Because of the speed of this game, there is no time for a memorable silly experience as could be found in GtR.
The high randomness also masks the high skill in this game – it reminds me of my first couple plays of Innovation which were absolutely baffling and frustrating. That experience was such a turnoff that I avoided Innovation for a several years.
After this many plays, I continue to be impressed with the tight design of Mottainai. I don’t think there are any wasted aspects in the game (such as Legionary actions in two or three player GtR). Every card in the deck can be perfect when used in the right context. As I become more familiar with the game, I find more and more contexts where a given card would be “perfect”.
I can attest that the dominant strategy that I mentioned in my first review was indeed a product of personal groupthink. Even though I heavily relied upon that strategy in my first twenty plays, it has completely disappeared over the past eighty plays. It’s too slow if the opponent is actively pushing a fast game.
I’ve gotten a good grasp over fast build approaches to end (and win) the game in the blink of an eye, especially now that I have gotten comfortable with craft-builds. However, I sense there is room for slower strategies to counteract this. I think this requires getting better at selling a few items early in the game. This of course causes a delicious quandary since early sales removes materials which could have been used for crafting multiple works. At the moment, this approach to keep the fast builder honest is rarely successful, but I think I could make it work about a third of the time if I deliberately practice this strategy.
Hopefully Asmadi will get the Wutai Mountain expansion reprinted soon, cause I’m looking forward to exploring this last horizon in the Mottainai gameplay universe.
Spoiler alert, I got my copy of Wutai Mountain, and it was glorious.
All in all, Carl Chudyk is a minor diety. We are lucky to live in his world.
Unfortunately for his games, I’ve taken to reading books lately. But at some point, I’ll be back, with a vengeance!