Katana Spirits

Katana Spirits is a light strategy game from Singaporean designer Geoffrey Chia. This game uses several characters also found in other titles from Good Spirit Games. Many of Geoffrey's games have a Japanese theme. Katana Spirits is a game about training yourself as a fighter and then going out kick some gangster butt. This is a game which uses polyomino tiles. 

On your turn you must choose to train or to fight. Training means claiming a polyomino tile from the centre of the table. Fighting means spending these polyominoes to defeat gangsters and score points. Six cards are laid out at the centre of the table in a 2x3 grid. On each card there is one type of polyomino you can take. When you train, you move a shared pawn one step and claim a polyomino where it lands. How you move the pawn affects where the next player can move it to, and thus the kind of polyomino they can take. If you are able to perfectly fill your player board, you will score 1 point. You will want to try to do this, while at the same time you want to prevent your opponents from doing the same.

The gangsters are divided into three tiers - minions, lieutenants, and bosses. There are many different types of minions and only three of them are available at any one time. Whenever one gets defeated, a new one will be drawn from the deck. There are exactly three types of lieutenants and two types of bosses. These are fixed, which means you can plan precisely when and how to defeat them, and which one you want to aim for. You cannot do such planning for the minions. If there is a specific minion you want to defeat, you'd better do it before somebody else makes their move. For every lieutenant you want to fight, you must have defeated two minions. For every boss you want to fight, you must have defeated two lieutenants. The game ends when one boss is defeated or when the minion deck is exhausted.

Defeating a gangster is just spending polyominoes. The total value of the polyominoes must match or exceed the strength of the gangster you want to defeat. Ideally you want it to be a perfect match. If you overspend, it means you have overstretched yourself and you will take one injury. When the game ends, if you still have injury, you will lose points. During the game you may skip turns to heal yourself.

Health tracker

All the gangsters you defeat are worth points. They have certain properties, and some of them give you extra points based on these properties. So there is an element of set collection when you defeat gangsters. Some gangsters give you ongoing abilities, for example you can move the shared pawn an additional step, or when you heal you heal an extra step.

Katana Spirits is a light strategy game which will also work as a family game. This will work with a casual crowd as it is not complex. You don't directly fight your opponents, but there is plenty of player interaction. You affect which polyominoes your opponents can take, and you will also compete for certain minions. There are several small things you can do to annoy your opponents, especially the player after you.