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| Paiko- Initial game setup |
Goal and Core Mechanics
Essentially, the goal of Paiko is to obtain 10 points before your opponent. Players gain points by positioning tiles on the board. This positioning of tiles is the core mechanic. A secondary mechanic is to capture tiles that your opponent places on the board.
Space
The game board is a discrete two-dimensional space, meaning that tiles are placed on individual points that are marked by grid lines. You can chose to move a placed tile by at most two points in any non-diagonal direction. As a whole, the board is split into four sections, two of these sections are middle ground, and the other two are the players' home ground. Tiles on the middle ground will give the player one point, while tiles in the opponents home ground will earn the player two points. The half grid spaces along the border and the four black spaces in the middle are not open to tile placement.
Objects, Attributes, and States
Aside from the board space itself, the only objects in this game are the tiles. These tiles have many different attributes. The first of these attributes is the symbol of the tile. This symbol describes the "threat" attribute of the tile. In Paiko, tiles have a certain space on the board that they threaten depending on their symbol and positioning. If a player's tile is within an area of threat from an opposing tile, then there is a chance that the tile can be captured. It's similar to the way that pieces can be captured in chess depending on their movement and proximity.
Another attribute of the tiles is the spaces that they can provide cover to. If a tile is receiving cover from another piece, it takes an extra threat to capture. Some of the tiles have a few extra attributes. For example, the earth tile can only move one space in a turn, rather than the standard two spaces. The Paiko rule book offers a good illustration of the different attributes of the tiles (http://paikogame.com/documents/instructions-quickguide33d-text-printable.pdf).
The tiles have various states that they enter as the game progresses. These states include the tiles' positions on the board, their orientations, the section of the board that the tile is located in, whether the tile is threatened or covered by other tiles, and whether the tile is in the player's hand, the reserve, or if it is discarded.
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| The tiles from left to right: air, fire, bow, sai, lotus, earth, water, sword |
Operative and Resultant Actions
There are three essential operative actions that a player can take in Paiko: placing a tile, drawing a tile from the reserve, or capturing a tile. These base actions lead to many resultant actions, such as threatening certain tiles to distract your opponent, placing tiles to offer coverage to pieces that are under threat, and favoring sections of the board for placement depending on if you decide to take an aggressive, defensive, or balanced approach. Players often need to shift their strategies in order to counter the decisions that the opponent is making.
Rules
An interesting aspect of the game is the initial asymmetry of it. The player with white tiles goes first, but only gets to pick out seven tiles, while the opponent gets to pick 9 tiles. To balance this, the white tile player gets to pick one more tile after seeing the black tile player's hand. All tiles must be placed on either the player's home grounds or any space that one of his or her tiles is threatening. If a tile is threatened by at least two opposing tiles, then it is captured. These are all operational rules of the game.
Another point of interest is the written rules of the game, which are presented in three different forms, a quick text guide, a more visual illustrated guide, and a video tutorial. For me personally, I learned the game quickly by looking at both the text and illustrated guide, as they each explained certain aspects of the game better to me than the other. Having two versions of the guide to refer to made it surprisingly straightforward to learn the game.
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| The visual guide (left) and the text guide (right) |
Skills
The physical skills necessary to play the game entail having the strength to pick up and position the tiles, as well as the ability to place the four separate pieces of the board together. Although the physical requirements of the game are fairly low, it does involve many mental skills. Players must observe each others tile choices and placements and decide how to react. They must also keep track of the score and adjust strategies to ensure that the opponent doesn't end up getting the upper hand. Paiko also involves social skills, such as observing your opponent's reactions to get a sense of what he or she is planning.
Chance
Chance plays a fairly subtle part in this game. Most aspects of the game are fairly open and controllable. For instance, if the player chooses to draw new tiles for his or her hand, they can choose any three tiles that they want. This seems to put a lot of emphasis on strategy and decision-making, rather than chance. The primary use of chance in the game is at it's start, when players must play rock, paper, scissors, or roll dice to decide who will play the white and black tiles. As I mentioned before about the game's asymmetry, the player will receive different advantages and disadvantages based on whether they get black or white tiles. This ends up affecting the player's decision-making throughout the rest of the game.
Overall, I enjoyed playing Paiko. The game is a bit difficult to comprehend at first, but it becomes fairly understandable after an initial run through. The potential for different strategies interests me, and the brevity of the game allows for lots of experimentation. I think the game would benefit from having more chance built into it. It seems to me that the game intends to give the player a lot of control over his or her strategy, but I think it would be more engaging if there was some element of chance mixed in with this controlled decision making.
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