Hanamikoji: Geisha’s Road

Geishas are making a journey across the tea houses to show their artistic performances to the guests. During this trip they will get help from you and your opponent, to advance from an apprentice to full Geisha or even evolve to Okaasan and become a teahouse owner.

2 players, ages 8+
Playing time: 20-30 minutes
Designers: Jerry Chiang & Eros Lin
Artwork: Maisherly Chan

Publisher: EmperorS4
https://en.emperors4.com/

Now live on Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tbdgames/hanamikoji-geishas-road

In Hanamikoji: Geisha’s Road players are patrons helping the geishas to get prestige by giving them presents. Similar to the first game in the Hanamikoji series, each player has 4 action tokens and starts their turn by drawing a card from the deck. They flip one of their tokens, execute the action and depending on the action play gift cards in the geisha’s slot.
When a geisha receives presents she will travel across the tea houses, a number of steps equal to the number shown on the played card. When her movement ends at her own tea house, she will receive lanterns as a token of appreciation.
After both players have performed four actions, they determine who has the most influence for each Geisha by totalling the numbers on the cards they played. For each Geisha, the player with the most influence wins their favor and receives all her lantern cards. The player who won the most lanterns wins the round, and the game ends as soon as one player manages to win two rounds.

The game comes with a Guest expansion that gives the players the possibility to score immediately by moving the Geishas one or two steps, convincing guests at the tea house of arrival to favor this geisha and thus collecting the guest tiles there. Players can score these tiles at the end of the round for sets of the same or different coloured guests.

Geisha’s Road brings some new dynamics to the gameplay we’re all familiar with from Hanamikoji: you still perform actions by flipping your markers, but this time you’ll also have to pay attention to the numbers shown on the cards. Influence remains the key part of the game, but might prove to be useless when a Geisha didn’t collect any lanterns. A twist that might appear to be small at first sight, but it brings making decisions to a whole new level!