Collect Ukiyo-e, Decipher Letters, and Seat People Properly at the Great Evening Banquet | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

Here’s a sampling of titles I’ve added to BGG’s Game Market Spring 2025 Preview:

▪️ Designer Saashi of Japanese publisher Saashi & Saashi has announced his new release for 2025: The Great Evening Banquet, which will debut at Game Market Spring 2025 on May 17, then be available at UK Games Expo 2025 ahead of a June 2025 retail release.

Here’s an overview of this 1-4 player game:

You’re in charge of seating guests at the state house at tables with VIPs, ideally not foisting anyone on the VIPs they’d prefer not to see, while simultaneously creating harmonious tables, both for the meal itself and the commemorative photos afterward.

To set up, each player has a set of six VIP tables, each of which seats four guests; guests come in five colors and four types, with five of each token — one of them raising a glass in a toast.

At the start of each round, fill the available carriages with 2-4 tokens, then each player chooses a carriage in turn and places all the guests at one or more tables. When a table is full, score it based on type (all of one or one of each is best), color (ideally not three), and raised glasses (the more, the better). Finally, did you meet the VIP’s conditions at that table, such as no guests of a certain type or at least two of a color? If so, you score the full value for that table; otherwise, your points are halved.

When you reach 10 points, you must swap a guest from the Grand Salon with one at your tables, whether that table has been scored or not.

After all tables have been filled, take the commemorative photos, scoring points based on how well you’ve seated guests in the rows and columns of tables.

The Great Evening Banquet includes expert rules in which the tables are close together and a guest can be seated at two simultaneously. Solo rules are included as well, with the number of carriages falling and rising each round.

As is his custom, Saashi is taking pre-orders for The Great Evening Banquet through his website for shipping in June 2025, with the page featuring a large “This game was manufactured in China” label to warn buyers of potential tariffs.

In other Saashi & Saashi news, the 2023 title Come Sail Away! was picked up for distribution by Asmodee, and editions have already hit the market in France and the U.S., with Spanish, Portuguese, and Ukranian editions on the way. These copies were produced in the same facility as the original 2023 edition, so the quality of the components is the same.

▪️ Another title debuting at Game Market Spring 2025 — BGG con preview here — is Lunar Trick, a 3-4 player trick-taking game from designer Iori Tsukinami and publisher SYNKA Games.

Every new trick-taking game needs to have a hook that makes you go “Hmm?”, and for Lunar Trick that hook is that the players collectively determine the suits each round. Here’s what’s going on:

In Lunar Trick / ルナトリック, you need to win exactly one, three, or five tricks in a round to score points — and to collect tricks, you need to manage the phases of the moon.

To start a round with three players, deal ten cards to each player and set the remaining card aside. Cards are 1-15 (rising moon), 16-30 (falling moon), and the lunar eclipse card.

Each player reveals a numbered card at the same time to determine the trump and three suits. For example, if rising moon had more cards played, then it’s trump. If the cards are, e.g., 5, 12, and 24, then the three suits are 6-11, 13-23, and 25-30+1-4. Whoever played the highest card of these three collects this trick, then leads the next one.

You must follow suit, if possible, or play the lunar eclipse card. If any trump is played in a trick, then the highest trump wins; if no trump is played, then the lunar eclipse wins; otherwise the highest non-trump wins. (The lunar eclipse card counts as a trick on its own, apart from the other cards won.)

Whoever wins one or five tricks scores 2 points, and whoever wins three tricks scores 1 point. Play multiple rounds until someone has at least 5 points and wins.

With four players, add the solar eclipse card to the deck. Whoever gets this in hand must play it during the first trick; they win this card, which counts as a trick, then determine trump and suits based on the other three cards, with the highest card winning that trick.

▪️ Yet another such release is Ukiyo-e, a 2-4 player game from Toshiki Sato of publisher さとーふぁみりあ (Sato Familie), in consultation with Michael Schacht since the design is based on his 2003 game Crazy Chicken, a.k.a. Drive.

Here’s an overview of the setting and gameplay:

In 1867, the World’s Fair in Paris sparked a craze for Japanese art and culture known as Japonisme. Art galleries specializing in Japanese ukiyo-e prints were established, and ukiyo-e became known around the world.

In Ukiyo-e / ウキヨエ, players take on the role of art dealers specializing in ukiyo-e and aim to hold successful solo ukiyo-e exhibitions. To lay down a set of cards, you need at least two cards if that type hasn’t been played or more cards than are already on the table if it has been played, after which any cards of the same type on the table are discarded.

The round ends when one player has six types of art (out of seven) or the deck runs out. Players score the lowest-valued card in each set on the table, which speeds up future rounds and can make sets more valuable.

I played a lot of Crazy Chicken more than twenty years ago when I first got into hobby games and discovered designers like Schacht who gave me exactly what I was looking for…although you might also say Schacht shaped what I was looking for by what I found.

In any case, it’s nice to see his work continuing to make an impact.

▪️ You can almost make out everything you need to know about Dowsing Mine from this cover by designer/artist Shota Hasuike of Lotus boardgames.

If you’ve ever played Minesweeper, then you’ll recognize the numbers in the grid, but instead of identifying the location of surrounding bombs, you’re seeing how many of the surrounding “squares” should be filled in. (No, they’re not actually squares, but that’s the author’s term, so let’s roll with it.)

To set up, fill your grid with the letters of a 3- to 5-letter word depending on the level of difficulty you want. The form of the letters is designated in the rules, and no two letters can have their leftmost square(s) on the same vertical line. (The size of the playing area differs depending on the player count.)

On a turn, you ask either for the number of squares filled around a particular block, or whether a particular square is painted or not. Since letters take particular shapes and cannot touch one another, you will use this information to decipher which letter “battleships” are which — and instead of asking for information on a turn, you can instead ask the opponent whether their letters are . If you guess all five correctly, you win; if not, you have one more chance on a future turn, losing the game if you’re wrong twice. (As in Letter Jam and other such games, you don’t need to guess a particular word since the same letters can spell multiple words.)

Once you’re good at the game, you can allow for letter rotation in the initial placement (although not for all letters since, say, “d” and “p” become indistinguishable when rotated), letter connections at a single intersection, and letter concatenation in which certain sections overlap completely.