We’ve purchased many new games this year, but Mottainai has seen by far the most plays. It’s at 29 already, far ahead of our second-place Roll for the Galaxy at 16, and this despite being one of our most recent acquisitions.
Of course, Mottainai has a very short playtime, varying from about 15 minutes to half an hour. So it makes sense that it gets played more. On the other hand, this is also a huge selling point for me. We have plenty of games that take about an hour, but we seem to have a constant shortage of games that can be played quickly and still have depth. This is one place where Mottainai really shines: I don’t know a single other game that has so much depth in such a short playtime. An average weight of 2.9 in a 15-30 minute playtime is pretty much unprecedented, as far as I know.
The depth does mean that Mottainai has a steeper learning curve than you might expect in a short game. I felt like I really had no idea what I was doing for our first few games, and there are some finicky rules that it took me a much longer time to grasp (hello, backorders). The game is not very intuitive at all. But I was willing to persevere because <PERSON> is pretty much my favourite designer. Innovation is probably one of my most-loved and most-played games of all time, so I was willing to put in the effort to learn this one as well.
Mottainai is actually a re-implementation of another <PERSON> game, Glory to Rome. I’ve enjoyed some of my plays of Glory to Rome, but it’s not one of my favourites or one of my most-played games, largely for one key reason: I play mostly two-player games, but Glory to Rome is best with three or four. 366
Mottainai, on the other hand, is best with two. That right there is a major difference, and probably enough reason to own both if you regularly game with groups of both sizes.
That said, I do think Mottainai is the better game overall. It’s more satisfying because you get to do more in a shorter period of time. Glory to Rome takes about an hour, and a significant fraction of that time is just spent building up to the main event, since you can’t acquire clientele or put materials into your vault unless you have enough influence first. Mottainai gets right into the meat of the game, allowing you to acquire helpers or sell goods immediately and worry about covering them later. I find this much more satisfying because I like actually doing stuff rather than waiting around to do stuff later, and the change also means that you’re much less likely to feel that you’ve gotten stuck. Another big advantage of the faster-paced Mottainai is that there’s not really much concern about a runaway leader; if someone does get an insurmountable lead, the game will probably end very soon after. This also compensates a bit for the “<PERSON> effect”, the fact that <PERSON>’s games are known for being wild and swingy. Wild and swingy isn’t that much fun in a longer game with a slow build-up, but it works pretty well in a shorter game that you can easily play three times in a row.
There are certain circumstances where the wild swinginess is too much even for me, though. My two most memorable games haven’t been games where I achieved a great victory; instead, they were games where my opponent played a card (Puppet) that let him steal my whole hand and left me essentially unable to do anything for the few turns I had left. That card can come up unexpectedly just when you’re about to execute a great move, and it’s really thoroughly unfun.
The fact that those plays were the most memorable may be indicative of another potential negative for this game: it has pretty much no theme or narrative. There is a basic premise behind it—you’re running a monastery, producing works to display in the gallery or sell in the gift shop—but that premise really doesn’t come through in the gameplay at all. I mentioned earlier that the rules are very unintuitive, and I think that’s largely because of the disconnect between the theme and the gameplay. 755