Wouter & Ymke 
At the foot of Mt. Yotei in Hokkaido, life changes with the seasons. Spring brings wildlife, summer brings food and activity, and winter turns the area into a snowy destination. In Yotei, you’re building a town in that setting, trying to decide what kind of place it becomes. Maybe you lean into farming, maybe tourism, maybe a mix of both. It sounds very peaceful, and visually it still does, but once you start playing, the game is a bit more restless than that.
What stood out to us quite quickly is that Yotei is really about committing to plans before you’re ready. You place a token on something you hope to collect later, even when you don’t yet have what you need. So from the start, the game gives you that feeling of, “right… now I need the rest of this turn, or maybe even the rest of this round, to go my way.” I mean, that’s the part that gives the game its personality more than the town-building theme on its own.
We’ve been playing a preview copy ahead of the crowdfunding campaign, and this is one of those games that made more sense to us after a few plays than after just one. Not because it’s hard, because it really isn’t, but because the interesting part of it sits a little below the surface.
👥 2-4 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 45 minutes
📝 Designer: Huy Pham
🎨 Artwork: Maria Kato
🏢 Publisher: Mighty Boards (preview copy provided)
Gameplay overview
The structure is simple. Each round has two parts. First you place your tokens, then later you try to collect the cards you aimed for. That’s easy enough to explain, and honestly, that’s one of the game’s strengths. You can get it to the table without half an hour of rule explanation.
During the placement phase, players take turns putting their character tokens on cards in the shared display or on one of the draw piles. Most of the time you’ll need to pay potatoes to do that. Yes, potatoes are the main currency here. I know that sounds a bit silly, but after one round you just accept it and move on with your life. Potato inflation is real, apparently.
The catch is that placing a token does not mean you automatically get the card later. You don’t need to meet the conditions when you place, but you do need to meet them by the time the harvest phase comes around. That means a turn is never just about grabbing something that looks good. You’re trying to judge whether that card will still make sense later, whether someone else is about to take the piece you were relying on, or whether you’re being too greedy and should go for something safer.
There are a few ways to approach that. You can place on a face-up card and try to collect it normally. You can flip a card face down and take the fixed effect on the back instead. Or you can place directly on a draw pile and collect a card for its face-down effect. That face-down system matters more than it first seems. It gives you a fallback when the open market isn’t helping you, or when your plan starts to fall apart halfway through the round.
Then comes the harvest phase. Starting with the first player and going clockwise, everyone takes back their tokens and checks whether they can collect the cards they occupied. If the conditions are met, the card joins their tableau and its benefits apply immediately. If not, they take back the token and any potatoes they committed, and the card stays where it is. So the game lets you take risks, but it also asks you to follow through on them.
Over time, you build a tableau of elements, points, and special effects. Some cards give mystery cards, which are one-use powers you can play whenever you like, or trade in for potatoes if that’s more useful. There are also bidding cards, where multiple players can secretly commit potatoes to the same card. The highest bid wins, but only if that player can still meet the conditions. If there’s a tie, the earlier placement wins. It sounds like a small rule, but it came up more than we expected.
The game ends when someone has collected two top-tier cards with star symbols. After that, players count their charm points, and every three leftover potatoes are worth one extra point. So yes, even your leftover potatoes can still help at the end, which feels fitting for a game where they’ve been doing all the work anyway.
Artwork, components, and visual design
We received a copy of Yotei from Mighty Boards before its crowdfunding campaign, so just keep in mind that what we played, and what you see in the pictures, isn’t necessarily final yet. Some things may still change.
The artwork fits the game really well. It’s colourful and clear without trying to grab all your attention at once. The cards show small scenes from life around Mt. Yotei, with a mix of nature, local food, development, and everyday moments. Every now and then there’s a small detail that gives it a bit of humour, which we liked. It keeps things light without turning into a joke.
That matters because you spend a lot of time looking at the table, comparing cards, and planning ahead. If the visuals were messy, it would get tiring quickly. But here, everything stays readable. The icons are easy to understand, the tiers are easy to recognise, and after a short while you can scan the table without effort.
The components themselves are solid. The standees are simple but do their job, and the wooden potatoes are honestly one of those small things that help more than you expect. There’s still something slightly funny about treating potatoes like your main strategic resource, but I guess that’s also part of the charm. The bidding boxes also work well. They keep that part of the game straightforward while still giving it a bit of presence.
The player screens show cosy interior scenes, which add a bit to the atmosphere. It’s a small touch, but it helps balance the more practical side of the game. Because underneath that friendly look, you are still making quite calculated decisions most of the time.
Our experience
What the game felt like for us was a series of small commitments that you had to manage carefully. You place a token somewhere and tell yourself, “this should work,” and then you spend the rest of the round trying to make sure it actually does. That gap between placing and resolving is where most of the game lives.
The placement phase moves quickly, but the decisions have more weight than they first appear. You’re not just picking a card, you’re trying to predict whether that card will still fit your plan later on. Sometimes that works out nicely. Sometimes someone takes exactly what you needed, and your whole idea just stops working.
The face-down cards and draw piles are important here. They give you a way to recover when things don’t go as planned. You’re rarely stuck doing nothing useful, which makes the game easier to play, especially with newer players. At the same time, that also means the game doesn’t push back very hard when you make a mistake. You can usually adjust and keep going.
We also noticed that the group makes a big difference. In a more relaxed group, the game feels quite open. People follow their own plans, adjust a bit, and things move along smoothly. In a group where people pay closer attention, the market becomes more contested. You start noticing what others need, what they might take next, and where you can get in each other’s way. That made the game more interesting for us, especially with more players at the table.
Player count also affects how much space you have to work with. With fewer players, it feels easier to build your plan without too much interference. With more players, the options close up faster, and you have to react more often. For us, the game worked better when there was more competition for the same cards.
We also found that the early turns tend to follow a similar pattern. You’re setting up your basics, getting the right elements, and making sure you can actually do something later in the round. That’s not a problem, but it does mean the variation comes more from how the game develops after that.
The ending added something interesting to our plays. Because the game ends as soon as someone collects those two top cards, you’re not just building your own plan, you’re also watching what others are close to doing. We had a few moments where someone pushed the ending a bit earlier than expected, and suddenly you’re sitting there thinking, “wait… I needed one more turn for this to work.”
That part works, because it makes you pay attention to the table instead of just your own setup. But it also means the game can stop right when things are starting to feel satisfying. We had a couple of plays where it felt like our engine was finally coming together, and then… that was it.
It didn’t really click for us in the first play, but once we understood how much the timing matters, we started to get more out of it.
Our thoughts
Looking at it a bit more from a distance, Yotei feels like a game that doesn’t try to impress you straight away. There’s no big “oh, that’s new” moment in the first play. Instead, it’s more about how everything works together once you’ve seen a few rounds. For us, that meant it took a bit of time to show what it’s doing, but it started to make more sense after we understood what it was actually asking from us.
What really holds the game together is that central idea. You commit early and prove later whether that was the right call. That structure connects everything else. It shapes how you look at the board, how you value cards, and how you react to other players. So even though the individual parts are not new, the way they work together feels considered.
I also think it helps to see this less as an engine builder and more as a game about judgement. You’re constantly deciding how far you can push a turn without losing control of it. That gives the game a bit of a learning curve. Players who get better at reading the situation and planning ahead will do better, even though the rules themselves stay simple.
The potato system plays a big role in that. Having one main resource for placement, bidding, and even scoring keeps everything clear. You always know what matters, and that makes the game easy to follow. At the same time, it does keep the strategy within a fairly tight space. You’re exploring variations inside one system rather than completely different approaches.
That does bring up replay value. We’ve played it quite a bit now, and so far it’s holding up, but you do start to notice certain patterns in how the early turns play out. A lot depends on what cards show up and how the market shifts after that. In some games it pushes you in a slightly different direction, in others it feels more familiar. So I think the long-term variety will really come down to how much the card mix keeps surprising you over time.
So where does that leave it? For us, Yotei is a well-made game that becomes more interesting once you spend some time with it. It’s not trying to be a big, defining release, and I don’t think it needs to be. It feels comfortable in what it is. A game that is easy to get into, gives you meaningful decisions, and works best when the group starts understanding how it ticks.
We’d mostly recommend it to players who enjoy light-to-medium strategy games with indirect interaction, a shared market, and the kind of decisions that reward paying attention to what others are doing.
📝 We received a preview copy of Yotei from Mighty Boards before the crowdfunding campaign.
