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Níjar takes us to southern Spain in the 1920s, to the small Andalusian town that gives the game its name. Long before tourism became important to the region, Níjar was known for crafts such as pottery, esparto and jarapas, the colourful woven textiles associated with the area. In the game, each of us runs a traditional pottery workshop, working with clay, glazes, kilns and craftspeople while trying to produce ceramics that people actually want to buy.
That might sound like a rather peaceful afternoon of shaping pots in the Spanish sun, but our workshops didn’t stay peaceful for very long. Workers get pushed out of action spaces, pottery prices drop when somebody sells before you, and that perfect card you’ve been eyeing can suddenly have someone else’s donkey sitting on it. Underneath the pottery theme, you’re trying to get wheels, kilns, glazing and esparto to feed into one another, preferably before someone interferes with the part you needed next.
👥 1-4 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 25 minutes/player
📝 Designers: David Bernal
🎨 Artwork: Jorge Tabanera Redondo
🏢 Publisher: Perro Loko Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
A game of Níjar lasts three rounds, after which final scoring determines the winner. During those rounds, you’re developing your workshop, producing plates, jugs and pots, and selling them for victory points. You start the first round with seven craftswomen, but this drops to six in round two and five in round three. Meanwhile, your workshop generally moves in the opposite direction, becoming more capable as you add cards and improve your production.
Most turns involve placing craftswomen on the central board. Each placement position belongs to a row containing three possible actions and a column containing a bonus. You choose one action from that row and receive the corresponding column bonus. If another player is already on the space, you can still use it, but you must place exactly one more craftswoman than is currently there. Their workers return to them, while you receive the column bonus once for every craftswoman you placed. There’s also a special action where you place one craftswoman and receive its collection of bonuses without pushing anybody out.
Those actions are used to gather clay, acquire and play cards, improve your technology, collect esparto, clean cracks and move pottery through your workshop. Cards expand different areas of that workshop, including potter’s wheels, firing kilns, glazing workshops, glaze kilns and cleanup areas. Playing certain cards also gives you immediate actions, so adding something new to your workshop can get another part of the production line moving at the same time.
Producing pottery takes several steps. Wooden vases move along your potter’s wheel cards, eventually allowing you to shape clay into plates, jugs or pots. These pieces start unpainted in your drying area and can then be fired in a firing kiln, at which point they’re ready to sell. If you want painted pottery, a fired piece needs to move from its kiln to a glazing workshop by paying the painting cost, before being fired again in a glaze kiln. Painted pottery can be worth more, but naturally requires more actions, resources and workshop space before it reaches the market.
The market changes each round. Demand tiles and dice determine the values of plates, jugs and pots, and you can sell up to two finished pieces with a sell action. Each sale scores immediately, but can also lower the market value for that type of pottery. Alongside this, cracks can accumulate in your cleaning area and eventually cost points, while cleanup cards let you deal with them and receive benefits. Esparto provides another branch of your workshop, giving resources or smaller actions such as firing, painting and cleaning.
Cards come from a shared display where everyone’s donkey also has a job. The card underneath your donkey costs nothing to acquire, while cards further away cost Perra Gorda depending on their distance. A card underneath another player’s donkey can’t be acquired by you at all. After acquiring cards, you move your donkey to another available card. Eventually, once you have no available craftswomen, you can close your shop. You immediately receive a bonus and continue taking bonuses on later turns while the remaining shops finish their business. After the third round, finished pottery still in your kilns, scoring cards, esparto sets and leftover resources can provide additional points, while unresolved cracks lose points. Whoever has the most victory points wins.
Artwork & Components
Níjar has a rather unusual visual style, mixing detailed illustrations with textured backgrounds and plenty of graphic elements. There’s quite a lot happening on the cards, from potters and pottery wheels to baskets, textiles and glowing kilns. At first it can look rather busy, especially once everyone has expanded their workshop, but I think that suits the setting quite well. By the end, your part of the table really does look like a workshop where someone has been working all day and forgotten to tidy up.
I particularly like how the individual workshops develop visually. You begin with a few starting areas, but cards gradually spread around your board as you add wheels, kilns, glazing areas, cleanup cards and esparto production. By the final round, everyone’s workshop looks properly occupied. It’s not always immediately easy to read another player’s entire tableau from across the table, but it does look like a place where things are being made rather than a neat spreadsheet of cards.
I especially like the wooden components. The craftswomen are screen-printed with little potters holding their pottery, and the colourful donkeys moving around the card display are hard not to like. The pottery itself is represented by cardboard plates, jugs and pots, with natural terracotta pieces on one side and colourful painted versions on the other. Seeing those pieces physically move through the different areas of your workshop makes the production process easier to follow.
There are plenty of other tokens and markers as well, so Níjar becomes quite busy once several workshops are running. The central board in particular can take a little while to read during a first game. Still, the physical pottery, workers and donkeys give your eyes something more interesting to follow than resource cubes moving between tracks. And let’s be honest, it’s difficult to stay annoyed at a card market for very long when a wooden donkey is responsible for blocking you.
Our Experience
Our first game was mostly spent trying to make our workshops function properly. We understood how clay eventually became something we could sell, but we weren’t particularly good at connecting the steps along the way. We’d take clay because we needed clay, then realise immediately afterwards that another placement could have given us the same clay as a bonus while letting us use the main action for something else. There were several turns followed by some variation of, “Ah. I should’ve done that the other way around.” Finding the action we needed was only half of it. Finding that action in a column with the right bonus was often what turned one placement into several useful steps, especially once our cards started giving us additional actions of their own.
The worker placement was where we started paying much more attention to the other players. Early on, we were quite happy to push somebody out if they were sitting where we wanted to go. That became less automatic once we realised how useful those returned craftswomen could be. We had several cases where someone committed multiple workers to a space, feeling rather pleased with the repeated bonuses, only to return a worker to an opponent who immediately used her to finish something important. After that, we started counting other people’s available workers almost as often as our own. Spending three craftswomen might produce an excellent turn, but that’s also a sizeable part of your workforce gone at once, while the person you displaced may suddenly have another turn available.
Cracks went through a similar change in our games. At first, we treated them as something to avoid whenever possible and tried to keep our cleaning areas tidy. Later, we became much more willing to accept them when the benefit was worth it. With cleanup cards in place, cracks started to feel more like debt than straightforward punishment. Taking some wasn’t necessarily a problem if we already knew how we’d deal with them. The trouble came when we kept saying we’d clean them later. In one game, “later” arrived rather suddenly in round three, with a nearly full cleaning area and several other jobs that seemed considerably more urgent. That workshop probably wouldn’t have passed an inspection.
We also became much more aware of when to stop improving things. Early in the game, adding another wheel, kiln or useful card feels like progress, but eventually we had to ask whether that improvement would actually do enough before the game ended. At the same time, our workforce was getting smaller from round to round. Closing the shop added another question. We initially assumed staying open for as long as possible was obviously preferable, but later found situations where using several remaining workers on one strong placement and then collecting closing bonuses worked better. There was also often a point where the workshop still had several things we wanted to improve, but what we really needed was to stop building and start selling.
Competition appeared in smaller places too. We started using our donkeys not only on cards we wanted ourselves, but also on cards somebody else was clearly interested in. Sometimes that was useful planning, and sometimes, let’s be honest, it was simply because we could.
Selling pottery became more of a race once several players were producing the same type, and the finite supply of plates, jugs and pots occasionally mattered as well. None of these things destroyed someone’s workshop, but they did mean we couldn’t plan our next turn by looking only at our own cards. By our later games, checking what everyone else could produce, sell or take had become part of deciding what we should do ourselves.
Our Thoughts
Níjar isn’t difficult because collecting clay, firing pottery or buying cards is complicated. The difficult part is deciding how much your workshop actually needs, how much you can get from the craftswomen you still have, and when another improvement has stopped being worth the time. You can end up with extra kilns, another useful wheel and several ways to paint pottery, only to realise there aren’t enough turns left to make proper use of them. I like that the game doesn’t automatically reward building more. Sometimes the better workshop is simply the one that started turning its clay and cards into points at the right moment.
Most of the interference in Níjar changes what something will cost you or when you’ll be able to do it, rather than removing something you’ve already built. Someone can make an action space require two craftswomen instead of one, block the card you wanted with their donkey, or sell just before you and lower the market value. For us, that’s enough reason to keep watching everyone else without making the game feel hostile. The endgame scoring cards don’t necessarily lock you into the plan you started with either. They can steer you towards certain workshop cards or types of pottery, but if one no longer makes sense, you can discard it instead of taking a normal turn to perform any main-board action. You’re not completely stuck with an objective that stopped fitting your plans twenty minutes ago.
Our main criticism is the amount of calculation that can happen later in the game. Explaining what each action does isn’t really the problem. The slowdown comes when one placement might give you two or three bonuses, trigger something in your workshop and move pottery through another stage, while changing the order could squeeze out one more useful effect. Players who want to compare every possible sequence can take quite a while over a turn. We caught ourselves doing it occasionally in the final round, especially when one badly ordered action could leave a piece unfinished or mean missing the sale we were aiming for. With players who tend towards analysis paralysis, I can see Níjar becoming slower than I’d personally want.
We’re less certain about how the different approaches will compare after many more plays. Esparto, cleanup, technology and pottery production can pull your workshop in different directions, and we haven’t played enough to say whether some combinations consistently work better than others. So far, though, the changing card display, action spaces and what the other players are doing have been enough to stop our workshops from developing in exactly the same way each time.
Níjar also ends before you get much time to enjoy a workshop that feels completely finished. I can see that being a drawback for players who love building an engine and then spending several rounds running the finished thing. Here, the final round often arrives while you’re still looking at another kiln or card you’d quite like to add. For us, though, that became part of figuring the game out. Our later workshops weren’t necessarily larger than our first ones, but we had a better idea of which parts we actually needed and which could be left alone.
If you enjoy worker placement and action chaining, especially when other players keep interfering with your timing, Níjar gives you an interesting workshop to figure out. We came away from our later games wanting another attempt, mostly because we could already see several things we’d approach differently next time. For me, that’s a pretty good place for a game like this to leave us.
📝 We received a copy of Níjar from Perro Loko Games.
