Mottainai Review

Mottainai: is it finally the legit Glory to Rome successor? Just another Uchronia? Why are the covering rules so hard to grok? Why is working in a Buddhist temple so convoluted? How do you even pronounce Mottainai?

Mottainai is another small box game from Carl Chudyk which means it’s complicated beyond its footprint and wise beyond its playtime. This 20 minute card game is a deep and engrossing experience that teeters on the boundary of annoyance and brilliance.

Mechanically this is certainly the sequel to the currently out of print Glory to Rome. It’s a sophisticated title that features that trademark agonizing decision process in how best to utilize your multi-faceted cards. It’s ultimately about churning through the deck and building powerful combinations to wreck the Zen atmosphere and steamroll your way to huge swathes of points.

Teaching this game is a bear. At the beginning of a player’s turn you play one of the cards from your hand to a task slot on your player mat before proceeding to perform each task above your opponent’s mats in clockwise order. Finally you take advantage of your own action before drawing up any cards you may have gained and ending your turn.

It sounds simple but in practice it is slightly awkward and severely compounded by the fact that a task allows you to perform a distinct action that typically has a very thin thematic tie to the gameplay. The reference summary on the player mat is pretty useful but even after multiple plays you won’t quite feel comfortable, as if you’re strapped into a couch that has small quills jutting into your flesh.

The Monk action allows you to take a card from the middle of the table (the “Floor”) and add it to your helpers – a collection of cards that give you bonus actions. Potter lets you take a card from the floor and add it to your craft bench. Smith lets you complete a work from your hand which means you gain the text benefit on the card you build, typically a powerful effect and the heart of the game. Tailor will let you draw additional cards, one of the few ways to actually refill your hand. Finally, craft lets you move a card from your craft bench into your sales.

All of these positions – craft bench, sales, helpers – are delineated on the edges of the player mat and highlighted. You’ll spend some time fidgeting with cards getting them to sit underneath the edges of the cardstock and manipulating their positions, which is a slight annoyance but nothing severe.

The real complications arise when you consider that you don’t have to perform the actual Task at hand, rather, you can substitute another action instead. You can pass up the opportunity by choosing to pray, drawing one card off to the side and adding it to your hand at turn end. You can also choose to craft a work from your hand (similar to smith), but you can only build a card that matches the same type as the task you’re executing. So a craft action in lieu of a clerk task means you have to craft paper, instead of potter - clay and so on. More subtle interactions and weird processes your brain needs to keep a handle on.

Smith and the alternate craft action are the only two ways to build works, which is the most significant area of the design. Works give you a host of permanent abilities that can alter your engine and harass other players to a small degree. There’s even a work with steep requirements that lets you instantly win the game if you meet its conditions.

The trick with these two actions is that you pay for works by showing additional cards of the same type. You keep these cards and do not have to pay with them, which is a substantial divergence from Glory to Rome and allows you to get cards out quicker. The “gotcha” here is that you pay for craft actions with material from your craft bench and for smith actions with material from your hand. Another layer another sub-rule and divergence you need to keep track of.

The final procedural tier is perhaps the mechanism that seems to be the most difficult for players to initially pick up. When you build a work you decide to place it to either the Gallery (left side) or Gift Shop (right side) which is again segregated on your player mat. The difference here is that cards in the Gallery will cover your Helpers while cards in the Gift Shop will cover your sales. Covering simply means that a card will count as supporting or boosting a number of cards equal to its number in the bottom left corner, a number that corresponds to its material/task type.

By covering helpers you boost their effectiveness giving you even more actions when they’d trigger. You are required to cover sales in order to score points for them at game end. Like the rest of this design, this is strategically fascinating as you’re committing to long-term positioning but it’s another nuance in a game full of them. At some point an average gamer’s brain becomes oversaturated and they just want to flip the table and play Carcassonne.

The bottom line with Mottainai is that this game wants you to think it’s brilliant by obfuscating simple concepts and interactions under multiple layers, layers which utilize foreign terminology. Building a work is simple, but to get there you need to first determine what task you’re going to play, how you’re going to take advantage of your opponent’s tasks, get your order of actions down, determine whether you’re going to do a smith or craft action, figure out if you have the correct number of materials, and then choose which side to place the completed piece of art on. Simply tossing the game in the trash requires you stand up and chuck the box across the room. Billy don’t need no task to take out the garbage.

Yet despite that condemnation, I can’t stop playing Mottainai. I know I’ve been hoodwinked and I don’t even care. Much like Phil Eklund’s fascinating Pax Porfiriana, even if the sagacity of the design is a façade, it’s a meal I’ll keep lapping up with half-contempt and half-glee. Working through the puzzling logic can be extremely satisfying and the game has this real knack of making your realistically minor accomplishment feel grand and magnificent.

In comparison to Glory to Rome I think it’s a slightly weaker title. It feels more complicated and obtuse yet offers a shorter and less satisfying experience. It feels a little more fate-driven as you have to deal with the cards you’ve been dealt and can’t adjust quite as easily. It also feels like it cuts your engine off just as the race hits top velocity. Yet I definitely must admit that the short playtime is enticing, as you can drag this small title out very easily and hit multiple arcs of play, even if those arcs are less significant.

The learning curve here is enormous but it does feel justified somewhat in that the depth correlates strongly to this commitment. This is the type of game you can easily get a couple hundred plays out of before mastering. For the price tag that is astounding and a true testament to the design and development work done on the release.

As you can tell, I’m all over the place on this one. I feel like Jack Nicholson’s slapping me around and I can’t quite decide if Mottainai is my mother or my sister. Some days I’m a huge fan of this game and others I want to shove it to the back corner of my shelf. It’s so frustrating because Chudyk is the Wizard of Oz hiding behind the curtain. We can’t reach forward and pull it back because that damn maze in Return to Oz lies between us (yes that one with those freaks on stilts with wheels) and we’re left trying to piece together the yellow brick road by utilizing helpers, back orders, and crafting when all we want to do is use our cracked and gnarled hands to get to work.