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The islands of Tatsumi have fallen out of balance. Elemental rifts have appeared across the land, and the people are relying on their guardian dragons, known as Tatsu, to put things right. You’ll fly across the surrounding sea, gather rings linked to wind, water, lightning and fire, make offerings at shrines, and slowly restore your own island.
The box promises guardian dragons and elemental restoration, but most of your attention will soon be on four colours of rings that refuse to score well in the same arrangement. Add blocked routes, limited storage and other dragons taking the ring you wanted, and restoring harmony becomes more complicated than it first appears.
👥 1-4 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 40 minutes
📝 Designer: Jeremy Rozenhart
🎨 Artwork: Shirley Gong
🏢 Publisher: Adam’s Apple Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
In Tatsumi, every player controls a dragon moving across a shared seaboard. This is a five-by-five grid of seawells, each holding a stack of elemental rings. The rings come in four types: wind, water, lightning and fire. You’ll collect them from the seaboard and later place them onto your personal island, where they can score during the game and again at the end.
On every turn, you must fly and choose either to gather or make an offering. You may perform those two actions in either order. When your dragon flies, it moves any distance in a straight orthogonal or diagonal line, and you collect the top ring from the seawell it leaves. Other dragons guard the seawells they occupy, so you can’t enter those spaces, pass through them or collect a ring from beneath them.
Gathering lets you take more rings from around your dragon. With the symmetric dragons, you may collect up to two top rings from orthogonally adjacent seawells. The asymmetric dragons replace this standard action with their own gathering rules. Some reach further across the seaboard, some need matching elements, and others include extra movement. The turn itself doesn’t change, but each dragon makes you look at different parts of the seaboard.
The rings you collect go into three holding slots beside your island. Each slot may contain any number of rings, but all the rings in one slot must share the same element. You can therefore hold three different element types rather than only three rings. If you finish a turn with a fourth type, you must choose one full group and move it onto your island as overflow. Those rings still count at the end, but you miss the immediate points, so taking a fourth element isn’t usually ideal.
Instead of gathering, you can make an offering at a shrine. Your dragon must be within range, and your holding area must contain the rings shown on the shrine tile. You transfer those rings onto your island, score them and flip the shrine to its other side, changing what it will ask for next time. Some offerings also let you place one of your scales on the summoning card beside that shrine. These animal cards provide either immediate points or an ability that stays active for the rest of the game.
Ring placement comes with several restrictions. Your first ring must cover an elemental rift, and rifts may only be covered by the matching element. After that, every new ring must connect to a ring that was already on your island. Covering rifts increases the immediate points earned when you place later rings of that element. You can also complete island blessings by filling specific patterns, which gives you another scale to place on any summoning card in play.
At the end of the game, each element scores in a different way. Water wants one large connected group, while lightning scores for separate groups. Wind prefers to sit beside different elements, and fire scores in sets of three regardless of where those rings are placed. They’re all supposed to be restoring balance together, but their ideas about island planning don’t exactly match.
The game ends when the thirteenth seawell is emptied or when a player can’t legally place a ring on their island. Everyone receives the same number of turns before final scoring. Players add their elemental mastery points to the fortune already collected, and whoever has the most fortune wins.
Artwork and Components
The first thing people are likely to notice is the seaboard. Rather than placing rings on a regular flat board, the game uses a raised tray with recessed seawells. Each one begins with four or five rings inside it, so the different layers remain visible underneath. As players remove rings, new colours appear and the board gradually empties.
Because the rings sit in visible layers, you can check the current top ring and the colour underneath it without lifting anything from the tray. Sand dollar tokens mark empty seawells, which also makes the progress towards the end of the game easy to follow.
The personal islands caught our attention as well. Each one starts as a detailed landscape containing rifts, paths and blessing spaces. Once the rings begin arriving, much of that artwork becomes covered by colourful patterns. By the end, every island looks different, even when everyone is using the same symmetric side. Some look surprisingly organised. Others look as though the four elements held a meeting and nobody wrote anything down.
The dragon pieces are large, easy to recognise and look good moving around the seaboard. The same elemental colours appear on the rings, shrine requirements, island rifts and reference cards, so you’re rarely translating between unrelated symbols. The summoning cards caused the most pauses in our first game because we had to check whether an icon meant immediate scoring, an ongoing effect or a condition linked to placed scales. Once we understood those icons, we rarely had to check them again.
Our Experience
Our first game began more or less as expected. We collected rings that seemed useful, moved towards nearby shrines and started covering rifts. Once we remembered that every turn contained one fly action and either gathering or offering, we rarely needed to check the basic turn order again. We thought we had a reasonable idea of what we were doing.
Then our islands began to fill.
I made the mistake of treating water as something I could deal with later. Water wants one large connected group at the end, but by the time I started paying attention, several other elements had split the useful spaces apart. I still had plenty of blue rings. They simply weren’t on speaking terms with each other. Another player had almost the opposite problem with lightning, because she had joined groups that would have scored better if they’d remained separate. Those early placements hadn’t looked important when we made them, but we were still dealing with them near the end.
The holding area caught us out as well. At first, seeing only three slots made us overly cautious about gathering. Once we remembered that each slot could hold any number of one element, we became much less restrained. Naturally, that led to the next mistake. Someone collected a fourth type without considering the overflow rule and had to place a full group earlier than intended, without immediate scoring. There was a brief silence around the table, followed by the familiar sentence: “Yes, I knew that rule. I just forgot it applied now.”
During later games, we stopped looking only at the ring we could take and started checking which colour would become the new top ring underneath it. We also paid more attention to where our dragons finished moving. An occupied seawell can close off a useful line or keep another player away from a ring they need. This led to a few discussions about whether a move was deliberately obstructive or simply convenient. As usual, the player making the move considered it entirely innocent.
We initially treated the summoning cards as one-off bonuses and spread our scales around. Later, we noticed that the lasting abilities on the mountainous summoning cards became stronger when we committed more scales to the same card. That changed how we looked at island blessings. Completing one wasn’t only about gaining a scale. It was also about deciding whether to strengthen an ability we already had or place the scale on a different card to gain something new.
In later games, we stopped treating every scoring condition as a separate task. We began pointing out placements that completed a blessing while also keeping water connected or leaving lightning apart. We still placed rings badly, but at least it was usually because we’d chosen one scoring plan over another, not because we’d missed a rule.
We started with the symmetric setup and moved to the asymmetric dragons and islands later. When we switched, our usual opening choices no longer worked as reliably. One island made placement order much more restrictive, while another dragon kept looking towards parts of the seaboard we’d mostly ignored before. We were still gathering, offering and placing rings, but the spaces we looked at first were no longer always the same ones.
Our Thoughts
The personal island gave us the most to discuss after each game because nearly every awkward placement could be traced back to an earlier choice. A ring may be useful for immediate rift points, a blessing pattern or final elemental scoring, and the best space for one goal can damage another. Fire is happy almost anywhere as long as you collect sets of three. Water needs room to connect. Lightning would prefer that you stop connecting things altogether. Deciding which objective to compromise on became the main question behind most placements.
What we liked is that collecting a ring is rarely the end of the decision. A ring gathered from the seaboard may complete a shrine requirement, which places it on the island, which may then cover a rift or finish a blessing and provide a scale for a summoning card. We didn’t follow that full sequence reliably in our first game. Once we did, we stopped judging a move only by the rings it collected and started checking what those rings could eventually trigger.
Our main criticism is that longer plans can depend heavily on what remains available when your turn comes back around. A visible ring may suit your island perfectly, but several players act before you and it may be gone by the time you can reach it. At higher player counts, the seaboard changes more between turns, so you’ll often need to replace your original idea with the best remaining option. There’s very little hidden information, but that doesn’t give you full control over what happens.
There can also be quite a lot to check before you finally move your dragon. Flight paths, holding slots, shrine requirements, the rings underneath each stack, possible island placements and any active summoning abilities can all matter at once. With players who want to calculate every outcome, one ring can become the subject of a lengthy committee meeting. And yes, sometimes everyone else is waiting while you stare at one red ring. We enjoyed working through those choices, but I wouldn’t bring Tatsumi to a group that becomes impatient when someone needs time to compare options.
The dragons and mythology mostly stay in the artwork and the names of the actions. During play, we were concentrating on connected groups, adjacency and scoring conditions rather than feeling like guardian dragons healing a mythical island. That won’t matter to everyone, but players looking for storytelling, exploration or a stronger sense of character may find the theme thinner than the box suggests.
The asymmetric dragons and islands, different summoning cards and weather module all change parts of the puzzle, but you’re still doing roughly the same thing each game. We’d come back to it to try a different island or solve the ring puzzle better, not because we expected the next game to feel completely different.
I’d mainly suggest Tatsumi to people who enjoy arranging scoring patterns and don’t mind seeing a plan disappear because another dragon took the ring first. It’s less suited to players who want direct conflict, a story-led experience or a strategy they can decide on early and follow without interruption. The first game can also feel harder than the rules make it sound, mostly because you won’t yet know which early placements you’ll regret later.
Our later games were better because we stopped judging a move only by the ring it collected. We also checked what it exposed, which shrine it left us near and whether those rings could still fit on the island. We still had failed water groups, unwanted overflow and dragons parked in suspiciously convenient places, but we also had more turns where one placement solved several problems at once.
And by the end, we were already arguing over which asymmetric island to try next, which is probably the clearest indication of where we landed.
📝 We received a copy of Tatsumi from Adam’s Apple Games.
