Yak Board Game First Impressions
Yak lets you buy bricks from a travelling cart-towing yaks.
Can you build the perfect point-scoring tower?
The village elder has given you (and others) the task of constructing a great stone tower to guide the merchants and their yaks in the Himalayas. Each turn, a yak pulls its cart into your village. Will you find stones for your tower or food for your reserves? Or will you need to visit the market to find what you need?
Yak Game Overview
Yaks pulling carts will rotate around the table from player to player. Players will take an action to gather resources from the Yaks or the market, or pay resources to buy bricks from the Yaks cart.
But, certain Yaks don’t accept certain types of resources so you have to plan for their arrival. However, a random draw of fog tiles can change the Yaks direction!
How do you win?
These bricks are built in front of the player and will score for groups of like-coloured blocks and for various layouts depending on a set of scoring cards. The most points win.
Main Mechanisms
There is the resource management of the meat, milk and bread you need to gather and spend. You also have the spacial and pattern-matching mechanisms of building the tower.
USP
The obvious reason I wanted to play this at Essen is because of those awesome Yaks. I figured even if the game wasn’t great at least I’d get a nice picture for Insta! But I trust Pretzel Games to put their wood to good use.
Theme
I don’t know much about life in the Himalayas but I do know Yaks pull carts to transport goods.
I like themes where you learn things I enjoyed reading about the Himalayan Towers that exist for an unknown reason. They believe they were maybe direction markers that could reach above the low fog allowing people to guide their yaks.
Setup
Lay things out and put tiles in a bag. It has that annoying step where you have to put a certain number of tiles in the bag depending on the player count.
Components & Artwork
Well, I obviously mentioned the great Yaks and Carts. There is also an adorable baby yak start player token.
The art has a nice style that I really like.
Ease of Teaching
The game is open information and fairly easy to pick up. As long as a player understands how to gather resources and buy bricks they should be good.
Similar Games
Gathering and placing a ‘thing’ in a pattern is something you do in a lot of games. How you gather and place that thing is what can make the game and buying them from rotating yaks works for me! This booth was in the same area as the new version of Azul and while lighter than that, that’s the kind of game I’d look at for gameplay.
Yak Review
Positives
The components obviously.
Planning for the Yak coming your way that has the brick you need, but also thinking about that change of direction and Yak diet is good fun.
It’s fairly interactive for a game of this type.
Negatives
We had a ridge in the board that made Yaks difficult to move clockwise. You had to pick them up from time to time.
Will be too light for some.
Summary
A fun and very good-looking game.
Jesta ThaRogue
