Godo
- Board's Eye View
- Mar 24
- 3 min read
Designed by Vedran Mocibob and published by Snovid, Godo: The Five Paths has a loose theme about monks seeking the paths to enlightenment. In actuality tho' it's an abstract strategy game for 2-5 players where you are placing out tiles and moving your monk meeple to earn resources but you also need to spend resources in order to move. The resources are represented by flower blooms in five different colours, and you're in a race to be the first player to collect five of each of them.
Players always have a hand of two tiles, and on your turn you place out one tile before drawing a replacement. Tiles have colours on two or three of the their edges and the only placement rule is that edges must match up (ie: red to red; green to green, etc). The monk meeples go in the corner intersections of the tiles. They can move along any path to another intersection provided you pay one resource of that path's colour. When you move, you collect blooms of all the colours at the new intersection. In addition, some tiles have icons on them that have special effects; for example, a gate icon lets you make a jump move all the way to another gate icon, and a fox icon lets you swap a bloom you've collected for one of another colour. Provided you can pay for each of them, you can make multiple moves but you must end your turn if you are at an intersection with a lantern icon.
The tableau of tiles obviously grows with each turn, and with it the number of prospective paths. Whereas you might initially move your monk along just one or two paths on a turn at the start of the game, this soon ramps up to increasingly long sequences of movements. You can't go immediately back and forth along the same path but you can move your monk along a circuit of paths so that you revisit the same intersection in non-consecutive moves on the same turn.
It might seem like the obvious strategy is just to use your turn to amass as many bloom tokens as you can but that isn't necessarily the case because any tokens you collect that go beyond what you need to complete that colour's path must be handed over to other players. That makes for an interesting mechanic: do too well and you'll be helping your opponents.
Monks cannot move to intersections occupied by other monks, so there's scope for blocking opponents, and as players complete paths so they get to place markers out at intersections. These don't block movement but they mean that those intersections no longer grant any bloom tokens when a monk moves there... Again, there's scope here for making opponents' paths more difficult.
Godo plays well at all player counts, and there's even a solitaire option. In our plays at Board's Eye View we've experienced quite wide variation in game length. This hasn't necessarily been linked to the number of players but rather the extent to which players succumb to AP (analysis paralysis). This is very much a puzzle optimisation game and some players can mither overly long over where to place their tile and, moreso, over the optimal sequence of moves for both collecting blooms and positioning their monk to block an opponent. We've had games that play briskly in less than 15 minutes and we've had games where players' pursuit of maximised optimal turns has more than tripled that playing time. Of course, if you've friends who dither excessively over their turns, this is a game for which you could always introduce a chess clock :-)
