Per the rules: “The Atiwa Range is a region of southeastern Ghana in Africa consisting of steep-sided hills with rather flat summits. A large portion of the range comprises an evergreen forest reserve, which is home to many endangered species. However, logging and hunting for bushmeat, as well as mining for gold and bauxite, are putting the reserve under a lot of pressure.

To start off, let me say that this game is very much on the lighter end of the Uwe Farming Worker Placement spectrum. That alone might tell you how you’re going to feel about this. Unlike some of the other UFWP games, this one has a pretty streamlined scoring system. Sure, everything kinda scores something in the end, but the bulk of the points come from the village cards that you build and the families that you have raised.On a player’s turn, they will place one of their workers onto an available action location, each of which can only accommodate a single worker, and then pay any associated costs before performing the action…or not. Players are allowed to place workers onto action spaces they have no intention of using if they choose to do so. And, players are not required to gain all the benefits from their chosen action location either. For example, if a player placed their worker on the space that rewards them with two Wild Animals, they could choose to take zero, one, or two animals. To set up the game, place the main action board on the table, putting terrain cards above the board and location cards below the board. The action tiles are shuffled and placed on the board as well. Put the appropriate board extension on the right based on the player count. Place all the pollution tokens in the bag. It’s a lovely core mechanism. And you really feel the pain of taking actions with sub-optimal timing. is a huge forest reserve with 17,400 ha of evergreen forest, which is rare even for Ghana. There are also mineral resources here, such as gold, diamonds, white alumina and bauxite. But that is not what this game is about.

Players then receive trees, fruit and fruit bats based on the number of resources removed from their supply board. Plus, there’s a thing going on around “training” the families who live in your village. (Though “training” seems like a bit of an odd choice of word to me, and I do wonder if it’s just a slightly awkward German->English translation … I kind of like to think of this action as “educating” your villagers instead of "training"). By default, a newly-arrived family in your village will cause pollution, and see bats as a threat to their livelihood. There’s an end-of-round action where your families all earn income … any “untrained” families do this by mining gold and bauxite — a process which causes pollution chits to creep down your tile tableau, putting spaces out of action for the rest of the game … and “untrained” families also don’t like having bats roosting in their home, which deprives you of a handy bat-keeping space. “Trained” families, on the other hand, earn their income in an ecologically-sound, non-polluting way, will happily provide a home for bats, and will also score you bonus points at the end of the game. So you really want to train your villagers, if you can. The Atiwa Range is a region of southeastern Ghana in Africa, consisting of steep-sided hills with rather flat summits. A large portion of the range comprises an evergreen forest reserve, which is home to many an endangered species. However, logging and hunting for bushmeat as well as mining for gold and bauxite are putting the reserve under a lot of pressure.Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Kibi, the mayor is causing a stir by giving shelter to a large number of fruit bats in his own garden. This man has recognized the great value the animals have in deforested regions of our planet: Fruit bats sleep during the day and take off at sunset in search of food, looking for suitable fruit trees up to 60 miles away. They excrete the seeds of the consumed fruit, disseminating them across large areas as the fly home: A single colony of 150,000 fruit bats can reforest an area of up to 2,000 acres a year. And the noise that the new kid is making is a high-pitched squeaking noise. Look at the lovely little bats! The Atiwa Range is a region of southeastern Ghana in Africa consisting of steep-sided hills with rather flat summits. A large portion of the range comprises an evergreen forest reserve, which is home to many endangered species. However, logging and hunting for bushmeat, as well as mining for gold and bauxite, are putting the reserve under a lot of pressure. In the game, you'll develop a small community near the Atiwa Mountain Range, creating homes for new families and sharing your new knowledge about the negative effects of mining and the importance of fruit bats to the environment. You must acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and grow your community. The player who finds the best balance between the needs of their community and the environment wins. Theme(s)

Each round also has a breeding phase which is good to try and make the best of with you needing a certain token requirement to get 1 more. Combining this with your supply board income is really essential to doing well compared to the other players as these are acting as ’free’ actions to get more tokens off your board and get your economy and engine going. There have been some runaway leader problems in this game when people haven’t put out enough families in the game and start to fall behind in terms of gold income or taking enough terrain cards to make sure they can collect their income and not waste it. The games replayability is ok with each games terrain cards providing a new puzzle to work with but you are essentially doing the same actions each game with the same supply board. I think the game would benefit from an expansion down the line just to bring some new elements to the game or it may become a little repetitive after 10 or so plays. The game ends after 7 rounds so is easy to see coming and plan ahead for.

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Atiwa won’t be a game for everybody; Lookout has slotted this into their "Advanced" range for a reason. It’s a bit mathy. It’s mostly heads-down, min-maxing gameplay where you’re concentrating on your own little world… and it might be analysis-paralysis hell for some players. Player interaction is present, but is relatively gentle; major disruption of your plans by an opponent can happen, but it’s a rarity rather than the norm (maybe a couple of times a game?). However, if you DO like this sort of game, the puzzle presented by those personal supply boards can be an absolute delight to chew over, and all of the game mechanisms live and breathe the setting. Atiwa doesn’t feel like a case of somebody taking a pre-designed game, and then eco-washing it with nice art and a trendy environmentalist theming. Everything fits. Everything makes mechanical sense. It’s an interesting setting for a board game, and you very much feel like the designer is telling the story that he set out to tell. Once the worker action is taken, you can take an optional fruit bat action – only if you have 3+ fruit bats, you have a tree on your board and you also have a space available for another tree. If so, place 3 fruit bats on your night card and then place a new tree on one of your cards. (This represents the bat’s nightly search for food, then their pooping out the seeds and the growth of a new tree…) Atiwa est du « pur Rosenberg ». On y retrouve tous ses « poncifs », sa patte : placement d’ouvriers pour obtenir telle ou telle ressource (arbre, fruit, or, villageois, nouveaux terrains, chauve-souris), et « couteau sous la gorge » pour nourrir sa population, ses ouvriers. Jusqu’ici, rien de bien neuf sous le soleil.