Game Review - Tsuro: Phoenix Rising

When we first decided to feature Tsuro: Phoenix Rising, I was bit apprehensive. I played the original Tsuro a while back and although it was a cute and visually pretty game, it was very straightforward and simple. I felt it was great game for young families or beginner gamers, but as someone who enjoys and plays a lot of heavy strategy games, it was far too basic to keep me interested. When Phoenix Rising arrived, I thought “Okay, they've added some new mechanics that might make the game more engaging”. I kept an open mind, but unfortunately, my experience of the original game was nearly identical to my experiences with this one.

As in the original Tsuro, players in Tsuro: Phoenix Rising work independently to place and/or flip tiles and follow the white path with their phoenix pawn, being careful not to run themselves off the edge of the board or collide with another player's phoenix. The game takes place in the night sky where a vengeful god has stolen the stars and the people of the land have sent colourful lanterns up into heavens to light the sky. This summoned the great phoenixes who have taken the gift of the lanterns and have begun to replace them with beautiful stars. Players control a phoenix with the intent of collecting lanterns and turning them into stars by creating paths that move through tiles containing lantern tokens. Once a lantern has been exchanged to a star, players collect stars and count those towards their final score. The lanterns are then placed anywhere else on the board that depicts the same colour of lantern. The end of the game is triggered by either one player being the first to collect 7 stars, or only one phoenix is left on the board. If a player places or flips a tile which creates a path that collides with another phoenix, takes their phoenix off the grid or enters an infinite loop, their phoenix is removed from the board. But this is not the end of that phoenix as these magical birds have the unique ability to resurrect and rise from the ashes! At the start of the game, each player is given a grey “Life Token”. If a player's phoenix is taken off the board for any reason, at the start of their next turn, they can spend their life token and get their phoenix back in the game, starting by placing a new tile anywhere on the edge that doesn't already have a tile. As each player is only given one Life Token, they must be careful not to be taken off the board for a second time or they are completely out of the game. Once a player reaches 7 stars or is the last phoenix on the board, they are declared the winner!

Now, I can not stand here and say this was a bad game, because I do have a lot of praise for it – especially when comparing it to the original game. I'll start off by talking about its visual and tactile appeal. The original Tsuro game was very visually appealing and had beautiful, touchable pieces. In Phoenix Rising, they have definitely stepped this up a notch and have paid especially close attention to the visual appeal. First of all, the box is beautiful but the really eye-catching parts are the first few items you see when you open the box: the instruction book and the translucent liner. The book features a beautiful, full page piece of art accompanied by the story of Tsuro: Phoenix Rising.

To be honest with you, I have no idea what the purpose of the translucent liner is...but it's really pretty!

The lantern pieces are also very nice to hold onto and...like I do...I think they look pretty tasty! We decided the blue one would probably taste like Gatorade Ice if they were in fact edible. (DO NOT eat game pieces!)

The tiles were, of course, very beautiful. They depict swirling clouds and stars in the night sky along with floating lanterns. The aesthetic of this really reminded me of Lanterns: The Harvest Festival, which is also a beautiful game. While the artwork on the tiles is quite different, the deep blueish-purple paired with colourful lanterns seemed very familiar. (One thing I will note is that you can already see cracking and flaking on the edges of these tiles….we played the game once…)

Then we get to the phoenixes themselves...now, although the pawns are kind of cool, they're actually really scraggly, with incomplete cuts and one of our phoenixes even broke off its base within 10 minutes of opening the box and we had to glue it back on. They're also not all made uniformly so some of them sit crooked or their wings are bend at strange angles. I know I may be expecting a lot from a board game pawn, but if these pieces are meant to represent the main characters of the story, I think they could have used a little more care and attention regarding their construction. We did, however, have fun referring to the grey phoenix pawn as “The Seagull” all night…

One of physical features of the game I really didn't understand was the hard plastic tile grid. First of all, nothing gives you anxiety like a very strict instruction page like this with NO WAY to discern which way is upwards or downwards! I mean, given a few moments, you can figure it out, but right off the bat I'm sitting here stressing that I'm going to bust brittle bits of plastic off of a $50 game I literally just opened. Not cool! I also just don't understand WHY it's included in the game at all. Sure, when flipping tiles it makes the job marginally easier but it seems like a great deal of plastic waste for extremely little payoff. Games like Costa Rica rely on tile flipping (made of almost exactly the same material) and don't require extra plastic to get the job done. I hate to sound so nitpicky, but in a world with a climate that is already in peril, we don't need luxury items in our already luxury items.

Now we'll talk about the game play itself. As I said before, this was not a bad game...it just wasn't very engaging for me. There was very little strategy to begin with; just follow the paths with your eyes, make sure you don't run off the board or into another player and try to fly past as many lantern pawns as you can. That's pretty much it...that's the whole game. I think a game with this level of strategy might be good for young families, beginner gamers or maybe one to keep at the cottage because its the type of game that doesn't require a whole lot of time or attention span. Again, this doesn't make it bad, but when you introduce it to a group of young, veteran strategy gamers (like the crowd at our monthly board game nights) we're going to get very bored, very quickly. This game absolutely has its place, but our group unanimously decided not to play another round after we finished our first game and went straight to the shelf to grab Dominion.

The game does come with additional instructions for a more complex variation of the game called “Winds of Change” where the tile with lanterns are also flipped when stars are scored. In my opinion, this doesn’t make the game more interesting or complex, it just makes it more random and runs more of a risk of tossing your friends off the board (which I’ll talk about next). They did however remove the “endless loop” rule so in that circumstance, those players care allowed to remain in the game. I’m not sure how much this helps, though, as an endless loop didn’t even come close to happening in our game.

One thing I dislike about this game, and the original Tsuro as well, is the ability to lay a tile and force another player off the board...whether you meant to or not! I'm the type of gamer that I would much rather focus on progressing my own goals rather than trying to interfere with the other players. On top of that, board game night is one of the very few opportunities I actually get to play games with my friends (it's a very common misconception that game store owners sit around playing games all day. We are FAR too busy to do that!). So when I place a tile and inadvertently toss one of my friends out of the game and they now have to sit there doing nothing while the game finishes, well, that just feels awful. I look forward to board game night to PLAY with my friends, not knock them out and watch them sit there. I wish Tsuro had a point deduction per knockout format rather than just having the players be out of the game. Phoenix Rising made an attempt to help this by giving players Life Tokens, but that only goes so far before you're in the same situation. Maybe I'm just too lax or soft, but I want to see every player at the end of the game and beat them because I played better, not because they got screwed over.

I do really like that this game supports 2-8 players. A lot of strategy games only accommodate 4, 5 or 6 players so it makes it a lot easier for me to suggest to couples as wells as larger families or groups of friends. Elder Sign and Codenames are my go to suggestions for larger groups for this very reason.

Although this wasn't a glowing, 10/10 review, I do believe Tsuro: Phoenix Rising has merit and that it is a step above the original! Give it a try yourself from our games library or find it in the T section at Scenic City Game Emporium!