I’ll admit up front that the thing about this that caught my eye was the word ‘ceramic.’ Raft Bridge is a 2-player game with ceramic tiles, played on a ceramic board. Slightly disappointingly, the player pawns aren’t ceramic—they could be glass, but look more like some sort of plastic. The game is the latest from prolific Japanese designer Mitsuo Yamamoto, and his 35th Kickstarter project. He describes himself as ‘a ceramics craft artist,’ and has produced over 50 abstract games, mainly using ceramic components.
But more important than this intriguing choice of material is what the game is…
Game Play
The game was inspired by the pontoon-style Mugiyama bridge on Lake Okutama, and your task is to build a similar floating bridge across a diamond shaped lake using hexagonal blue and green patterned raft tiles, and then get take your pawn (blue ‘water fairy’ or green ‘forest fairy’) across it.
To begin, you place your starting tile and fairy at one end of the board, and your opponent does the same at the opposite end.
Each turn consists of placing one of your ten tiles on the board to build out your bridge, and then moving your pawn as far as you want along the bridge—but you can only move across tile boundaries where the two tiles share the colour matching your pawn. However, you can skip the second step, and if you leave your pawn on its starting tile, you can instead move or rotate any tile already on the board, so there’s an interesting tension between leaving your pawn at the start to you can disadvantage your opponent by changing the path they intended to use, and racing along your path as you build it out, to reduce the chance of your opponent doing the same to you.
The game ends either when you reach your opponent’s starting space, or if one of you lands on the same space as the other and pushes their pawn off the bridge into the water.
Sounds simple, but that hides a fair amount of strategy.
Impressions
The materials used for the game do make it rather attractive, especially the wood-framed board. I think I’d be worried about the board chipping and cracking, though, but a beautifully painted fabric alternative is also available.
In a nicely thematic touch, Mitsuo has designed the pawns to have rounded bases, so that they wobble when placed on the floating bridge. If you’ve ever walked across a floating bridge, you’ll know how that feels!
The game is compact (the smaller board option is about 20cm square, though an even smaller fabric board—30 space rather than 36—at 15cm square is available for early backers). A slightly larger variant 25cm square is also available, with 64 spaces and 12 tiles per player (as well as their starting one).
You can find out much more about Raft Bridge on its Kickstarter page, including links to Mitsuo’s previous projects. I did like the comment in the environmental commitments section that ‘Ceramic materials can keep their shape and color for hundreds [of] years.’ I’m not sure I can say that about any of the games currently in my collection.
Note: this is based on preview information, and the published game may differ.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
