Zen Chess for Beginners

Shimpei Sato (game designer), Onitama

New board games coming from mainstream publishers anymore tend to be too complex, require huge teams, or tie themselves to lucrative media properties. I seldom see games like chess or Go, timeless exercises of strategy, spatial reasoning, and friendly competition based upon trust and agreed-upon rules. And I especially see few with rules straightforward enough to savvy in one sitting.

Japanese game designer Shimpei Sato designed this game to mimic the experience of a traditional martial arts tournament. The game arrays one master and four pupils across a limited space, and gives them the goal of capturing opposing pieces. It requires players to think several steps ahead, which isn’t always easy. And unlike similar board games, it provides multiple ways to win.

Superficially, Onitama resembles chess, in having a geometric board and pieces. The board measures five squares by five, and each side has five pieces (ten altogether), so one-fifth of the board is occupied at the beginning of the game. But unlike chess, moves aren’t circumscribed by pieces’ nature. Available moves are determined by cards, which are dealt out at the beginning of the game, and which resemble traditional martial arts moves.

Any piece can move according to the cards players have available to them: many of the same basic lateral or diagonal moves that characterize chess. Thus there’s no memorizing which pieces can make which moves. However, here’s the trick: once you make one particular move, you remove that option from your choices, and pass it to your opponent. Any action you take, will become your opponent’s option on their next turn.

The game has sixteen possible moves available for players, but only five get used per game. I still haven’t seen all sixteen options yet (expansion packs are available). This means that every game has a distinct set of moves available, and one game won’t resemble the next. Like proficient martial artists bringing their unique skill sets to competition, this game changes every time you play it. Most board games can’t say that.

So the comparisons to the two obvious choices I’ve already mentioned, chess and Go, make sense. Yet it’s also a different experience, because the elegant simplicity of the rules (it took about two minutes to read the rulebook aloud) and fairly small board mean the game goes fast. It’s certainly possible for timid or deliberate players to drag the game by overthinking each move, but in practice, each individual game runs around fifteen minutes.

Some readers may find my repeated comparisons to chess and Go off-putting, because these games require a long learning arc, and an attention span many players lack in today’s success-oriented culture. I can’t stress enough: you can learn this game in mere minutes. You can play it before your coffee gets cold. Yet you can do this without exhausting its seemingly limitless ability to adapt to you.

The Onitama starting position (left) and in play (right)

Licensed from designer Sato for American production by Texas-based Arcane Wonders, the game design consciously channels images of Japanese beauty and Zen tranquility. The “board” is a scroll, actually printed on a non-skid vinyl mat, similar to a mousepad. The art resembles sumi-e painting, featuring woodland temples and disciples practicing standard moves. This design is somewhat stereotyped, though given the martial arts theme, that stereotype is perhaps earned.

The whole game folds into a box slightly smaller than four-by-eleven inches, smaller than most games manufactured by better-known companies like Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers. That makes it ideal for stuffing into a backpack or attache case and taking it around town. I’ve played in a coffee shop, a bar, and a restaurant, because it’s small enough to travel, and light enough to set up in a public place.

This combination of portability and simplicity makes it a good sharing game. Unlike Go, which can last for hours and involves hundreds of tiny stones that can become easily lost, Onitama has few parts and goes swiftly. Given time, I suspect that playing Onitama in a coffee house may become as popular as playing chess in the park, a boilerplate of good-minded people sharing an experience without spending money.

With very simple rules that make for easy learning, but the ability to evolve from one game to another, this makes an ideal all-ages game, a bridge to learning more complicated traditional board games which may require intense concentration students sometimes lack. I must admit, people playing Onitama against me have repeatedly cleaned my clock. Yet I keep coming back for its simplicity, strategy, and grace.