by Denis2906

Hi all,

I am a hobby board gamer and proud father of a 4 year old boardgamer to be.
We have a 30+ catalog of kids games, so he is pretty experienced for his age.

Not to the review.
Toriki is a like a choose your own adventure game. It is very light in mechanics. Choose where to go, which item to use and eventually which items to combine. The food will slow you down sometimes, some effects will take a turn from you, but that's it.
Exactly the simplicity of the game allows you to play this with a 4 year old toddler. Of course you will have to do all the admin and carry the story with your roleplaying and excitement. But this is a game that will give you (yes you the adult person reading) a lot of excitement. Maybe it's because I love the survival theme (especially castaway) but I got so immersed. I will try not to spoil anything, but everything you would expect in this kind of story you will find.

For me the highlight of the game is when you use visual clues provided by the excellent and beautiful map and wildlife catalog, to combine a new type of item. Sometimes you take a new card from the hidden deck, sometimes you get a new token from the very thick and high quality puchboard and sometimes you will open new envelopes (legacy style). My toddler got super excited in this moments, he would run around the house carrying the newly opened token and tell his mom what we got while she was showering.
These are now some of the best boardgaming moments I have, especially with my kid.
And these moments are not rare, you will be opening new stuff, reading new story, creating items all the time.

It's not perfect.
- The game lasts for 6 to 8 hours. After that I really doubt you will want to play again, there is no story branching. Maybe you will miss some details, but I highly doubt it would be enough to play again.
- I did say you can play this with a 4 year old, but not every 4 year old is the same. To be safe I would recommend to wait until 6 years old and I believe it would be even more fun (maybe I will try again in 2 year, when we forget a bit).
- We played this game in 2 sessions. So 1. session was like 4 hours long and really fun all the time. 3 days later the second time we played my toddler just didn't have the same patience. I was so eager to see the story trough that I kind of forced it a little bit, so he was playing a bit "make-believe" toy stuff, while I was playing his and mine character and telling him what is happening. This is my bad.
- It can happen at the end that you find something that would be useful 2 hours before, but its useless at this moment.
- Some of the magic/mystery disappears and you just want to "checklist" the rest of objectives and places before you finish the game.
- One last small thing, other bgg users also mentioned is the item sharing. You have to be in the same spot to exchange items between characters. Thematically it makes perfect sense. But in a game where there is no real timer or stress, this only sometimes slows down the exploration and fun. In our second session I just ignored this and the game worked fine and the pace was better. (if you care about realistic scoring in the end you can't do this).

Forgot to, but must mention
You need to use an app. Tablet would be best. Don't get put off by this. You will read text from the device. You will scan QR codes on item cards. Your kid will love it. The main attraction of the game are the beautiful components: map, cards, tokens and story. It is not the device. Still, without the device you would not be able to make the crafting aspect this simple and interesting, it works, its great. All components can be used after playing the game (it's not legacy style tearing). But you will write into a wildlife catalogue booklet. This booklet can be downloaded and printed again. So no worries.

To summarize
I highly recommend this game. For parent of kids 6 to 10 this is a must have or must play.
Even for adult without kids who are fans of this theme, I this they would also enjoy this a lot.

If the designer, publisher or anyone else involved in this project is reading.
1. Thank you
2. Please, please make a sequel. (Snowy mountains airplane crash, post-apocalyptical, zombies, exploring north/south pole, exploring island with your ship) What ever you do, I will be in line to buy. 🙂



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