Tongiaki was one of the first games I picked up when I started buying European style games. It can be a chaotic game with a rapidly changing board and board positions, which may not appeal to everyone. Still, while I have bought many games since I picked on Tongiaki, it still makes it onto the table on a regular basis.
Tongiaki is a game of Polynesian exploration in which your tribe is trying to get a foothold on as many islands as possible. Of course, everyone else’s tribe has the same goal. While you will need the help of other tribes to reach some of the islands, the ultimate control of the islands will always be a competitive struggle. There will be times when cooperation will give way to the strategic need of drowning people.
Tongiaki comes with a box full of pretty components. There are thirty-two tiles, sixteen ocean tiles and sixteen land tiles, including the starting island, Tonga. The tiles are hexagons with curving sides, which makes them look quite a bit like ninja throwing stars. Each tile has a red dot on it, which is used to determine orientation for placement.
There are enough pieces for six different players in red, green, purple, orange, blue, and yellow. Each player gets fifteen little wooden ships which are the outlines of the Polynesian sailing ships called Tongiakis, which is where the name of the game comes from.
To start the game, the island of Tonga is set in the middle of the playing area. The back of Tonga is white, as opposed to the blue of the other tiles, making it easy to pick out. The rest of the tiles are then shuffled. Each player gets a set of ships.
Every island has a number of beaches with each beach having a number of slots for boats. The starting island, Tonga, has six beaches, each with three slots. At the start of the game, the players go around twice, placing a ship on one of the slots until every player has two ships on the island. They are not allowed to fill up any beach.
After everyone has their two ships on Tonga, the set up is finished and the game is ready to begin.
On your turn, you have two choices. 349
You can either expand your population on one island, which might lead to migration, or you can king an island, if you have sole occupancy of that island.
Most of the time, you’ll be expanding your population. That’s the real meat of the game. When you expand your population, you double the number of ships you have on one island. However, you cannot put down more ships than there are beaches on the island, so there are going to be times you don’t get to out and out double.
If you fill up a beach, then that will lead to migration, which is how you get more tiles out onto the board.
Some of the beaches have more than one launch, which indicates the direction the migrating ships will go. The player who caused the migration picks which launch the boats will leave from and then draws a tile and places it. If the tile is an island then it was a pretty easy migration. You take all of the boats from the beach and distribute them onto the beaches of the newly found island. You must place at least one boat in each beach before you add a second boat to any beach.
And yes, since some of the beaches are quite small, with only two slots, it is possible to discover a new island, populate and then have an immediate migration. Sometimes, one player’s turn can turn into a chain reaction, changing the board considerably.
However, half of the tiles in the game are ocean tiles, which are riskier. Each ocean tile shows a number of ocean paths, many of which have numbers on them from two to four. The numbers are the number of DIFFERENT colors of boats needed to cross that ocean path. It’s not the size of the fleet but the diversity of the fleet that matters. If there are not enough different colors in the fleet, the fleet is lost, everyone drowns, and those ships go back to their owners.
However, if the fleet is able to make it, another tile is drawn and added to the board. If it is an island, the island is populated the same way as previously mentioned. If it’s another ocean tile, the process keeps on going until either the fleet drowns or an island is found.
By mid game, there should be a pretty well defined chain of islands and known ocean paths.
If you are the only person on an island, you have the option of kinging that island. Instead of expanding, you place one of your ships on the mask that is in the center of the island and any other ship you have on the island returns to supply. 349