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Sometimes a game arrives in a small box and you immediately think, “Alright, this should be quick.”
That was pretty much our first reaction when we opened Himizu. The board is tiny, there aren’t many pieces, and the rules aren’t particularly difficult. It looked like one of those games you can explain in a few minutes and start playing right away. That’s exactly what happened.
The surprising part was how quickly those sixteen spaces started feeling important. Himizu is a two-player game about two elemental spirits fighting over a forest clearing. Fire wants to spread across the board until every terrain tile has been placed. Water wants to stop that from happening and, if possible, remove every flame from the board entirely.
👥 2 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 20 minutes
📝 Designer: Carles Carreras
🎨 Artwork: Ariadna Altimira & Carles Carreras
🏢 Publisher: 2Tomatoes Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
The game starts with Fire placing two flame figures onto the board, while Water begins with a single wave figure. Fire always takes the first turn. From there, players move their pieces around the board, use abilities, reshape the terrain and work towards completely different victory conditions.
One thing that’s worth mentioning immediately is that movement is limited. By default, players only have three movement actions per turn, although abilities can increase that number. On a board with only sixteen spaces, those movement points disappear surprisingly quickly. A single extra move can completely change what you’re able to reach, escape from, or set up for later.
Fire’s objective is straightforward: spread. Every time a flame moves, it leaves burning terrain behind, and that burning terrain can later become charred terrain. Fire can also trigger proliferation, causing new burning spaces to appear between existing flames and allowing the fire to grow without directly moving there.
Fire isn’t always rewarded for spreading as quickly as possible. The terrain you’re creating helps move you towards victory, but it also changes the board for your own pieces. Several times we realised we’d created exactly the terrain we needed while also making it harder to reach the spaces we wanted next. Fire isn’t simply trying to cover the board. It’s trying to do that without painting itself into a corner.
Water approaches the game from a completely different direction. Instead of controlling multiple figures, it relies on a single wave and a small collection of puddle tiles. The wave can travel through puddles efficiently, remove burning terrain, and eventually remove flame figures directly. Meanwhile, puddles can be repositioned around the board to interfere with Fire’s plans, remove terrain, and alter how the battlefield develops.
At first glance, Water looks like the side that’s constantly reacting. In practice, it often felt more proactive than we expected. The obvious move is usually removing the fire that’s causing trouble right now. The better move is often identifying which burning tile is about to become a problem two turns from now. A lot of Water’s decisions revolve around anticipation rather than cleanup, and that became more apparent the more we played.
The final piece of the puzzle is the power-token system. Whenever players spend tokens to activate abilities, those tokens are handed to their opponent. Tokens are also worth more to their original owner. We regularly found ourselves passing on abilities we wanted to use simply because we didn’t like the idea of handing those tokens over. Sometimes using a powerful ability felt less like gaining an advantage and more like taking out a loan that would need to be repaid next turn.
Fire wins if all sixteen terrain tiles are on the board at the same time, whether they’re burning or charred. Water wins if it manages to remove every flame figure from the board. If neither side reaches its objective by the end of the tenth round, Water wins.
Artwork, Components and Presentation
There’s not a huge amount in the box. You get the board, a few wooden pieces, terrain tiles, player aids, and the tokens needed to play. Himizu isn’t trying to impress players with quantity. Instead, it focuses on making a small set of components do a lot of work throughout the game.
What helps the game stand out is its artwork. A lot of abstract games focus entirely on function and don’t give players much to connect with beyond the mechanics. Himizu still keeps readability as a priority, but it also gives its two spirits actual personality. The fire spirit looks energetic and slightly chaotic, while the water spirit has the expression of someone who already knows they’re about to spend the afternoon cleaning up somebody else’s mess.
If Himizu had used generic cubes, I think it would have lost some of its charm. The custom wooden pieces aren’t complicated, but they give the game a lot more character than standard pawns would have. The artwork on the player aids does something similar. We remembered the fire spirit and water spirit far more than we expected to after our first game.
The board also changes visually as the game progresses. What starts as a peaceful green clearing gradually fills with flames, puddles, mud and scorched terrain. By the end of the game, the board often looks completely different from how it started. At the same time, everything remains easy to read. Even when the board becomes crowded, it’s generally clear what is happening and which spaces matter most.
Our Experience
Going into Himizu, the game gave a very straightforward first impression. Small box, simple rules, not many components. After our first game, though, both of us wanted to switch sides and try again. Not because we thought we’d mastered it. Quite the opposite. We both felt like we’d only scratched the surface of what the two factions were trying to do. There were several moments where we could see that the other side had options we hadn’t fully understood yet, and that curiosity made us want another game straight away.
The biggest shift happened with Water. During our first play, Water often felt reactive. Fire was spreading across the board and Water seemed to spend most of its time trying to contain the damage. After a few more games, that impression started to change. We realised that the important decisions weren’t usually about dealing with the biggest problem on the board right now. They were about identifying which spaces would become important later. Once we started thinking that way, Water became much more enjoyable to play. It felt less like firefighting and more like shaping the future state of the board.
Fire felt easier to understand from the beginning. You’re expanding, creating terrain and working towards a very visible objective. But the more we played, the more we realised that Fire has its own challenges. Several games featured moments where we became a little too enthusiastic about spreading and ended up limiting our own movement options. More than once we reached a point where the board looked fantastic for Fire, only to realise we’d made the next few turns considerably harder for ourselves. Those situations often produced the most satisfying decisions of the game.
We also noticed that understanding one side made us noticeably better at playing against it. After spending a few games with Fire, we became better at recognising which threats Water should focus on. After spending time with Water, we became more careful about where and when we expanded as Fire. Because of that, switching sides never felt like replaying the same game from a different seat. Every match left us with a few new ideas we’d want to test next time, whether that was a different opening, a different use for puddles, or simply a better understanding of when to spend our power tokens.
Our Thoughts
The most impressive thing about Himizu is how quickly the board becomes crowded with meaningful decisions despite how little is actually in the box. The game doesn’t rely on lots of systems, exceptions, or layers of extra rules. Most of the interesting situations emerge naturally from the interaction between the terrain, the movement restrictions, the asymmetrical objectives and the shared resource system.
More than anything else, Himizu feels like a game about space. The power tokens are important, but the board itself often felt like the most valuable resource. With only sixteen squares available, every flame, puddle, obstacle and movement decision has an immediate impact. The board fills up surprisingly quickly, and small positional choices can end up affecting several turns that follow. That’s where many of the game’s decisions come from.
The asymmetry also goes beyond simply giving players different powers. Fire and Water have very different relationships with the board. Fire is trying to complete a puzzle before time runs out. Water is trying to make that puzzle unstable. That difference gives both sides a distinct identity and helps the game avoid feeling repetitive, even though both players are interacting with the same small space.
There is no randomness, no hidden information, and no variable setup, but that’s not necessarily a weakness. Many abstract games work exactly the same way. But it does mean the game’s longevity depends almost entirely on whether the evolving board states remain interesting after many plays. We enjoyed exploring the system, but that will ultimately vary from group to group.
After several games, what stood out wasn’t a particular ability or special rule. It was the constant feeling that the board was changing faster than we could comfortably deal with it. Fire is trying to cover the board before time runs out. Water is trying to figure out which fires need attention now and which ones can wait. By the end of our plays, we found ourselves looking at the same sixteen spaces very differently than we had at the start.
We finished our plays feeling like there was still more to discover. We wanted to try different openings, experiment with the timing of abilities, and see whether some of our assumptions about each faction were actually correct. That’s probably the best compliment we can give a game like Himizu. It kept us thinking about the next match before we’d even packed it away.
📝 We received a review copy of Himizu from 2Tomatoes Games.
