Publisher Focus: Saashi & Saashi
Written by Fiona Dickinson of Tabletop Rescue
Saashi & Saashi are one of the first Japanese publishers I heard about when delving deep into hobby board gaming. Let’s Make a Bus Route was the first game that caught my attention and I was lucky to have friends in Japan at the time who could get hold of a copy for me! Since then, Saashi & Saashi has had a handful of games licensed for wider distribution in the UK, Europe, and North America, which has brought some of their titles to a wider audience. Perhaps you’ve found Photograph, published by Matagot, which is a reprint of Wind the Film, or Get on Board: New York & London, which reimplements Let’s Make a Bus Route. Remember Our Trip has also become a firm favourite in our collection, with its roll-and-write adjacent mechanics kindly brought straight to European audiences by DLP Games.
Photograph/Wind the Film
A great set collection hand management puzzle which makes the most of the excellent Saashi and Saashi art. I partularly love the Tortoise bing taken for a walk!
Photograph (or Wind the Film) is a hand management game that plays with the idea of not being able to re-arrange cards in your hand, except that in a lovely thematic way, you are allowed to wind forward a single photograph in your hand each turn. Your aim is to try and play numbers in numerical order by colour, so manipulation is key to making as few mistakes as possilbe. If you’ve had the chance to try it and want to explore more card games from Saashi & Saashi, then In Front of the Elevators, or Before the Guests arrive could be a great next pick. Before the Guests Arrive is the simpler of the two and has the fantastically obtuse and universal theme of tidying up. Of course, you want to be the best and most efficient at this task and no one is cooperating - each person is only willing to tidy away their own stuff. You're carefully selecting cards from a tableau to ensure that you get the right blend of people and stuff cards so that your people match with their own possessions but also that they can tidy efficiently, with most being able to carry two types of objects at a time in any quantity.
In front of the elevators
Who knew queuing could be so fun?!?!
For a more brain-burning experience, In Front of the Elevators never fails to confound me with its tough decision-making. Once again it’s a pretty tangible theme, especially for those of us in the UK - queuing! You are members of a family, queuing to take the elevators, but different family members have permission to cut in the line in front of other family members. At the end of each round, you want your family members to be near the front of the queue, but there's always the risk that if three grannys, three dads, or any three matching family members meet, they'll ditch the queue and head to the cafe instead! Both games have that 'let's play again' quality, as you grasp more and more of the strategy towards the end of t your first play.
Let’s Make a Bus Route
A highly interactive roll/flip and write. This game overcomes the multiplayer solitaire feeling many roll/flip and write’s have.
Get on Board: London & New York is a ‘flip-and-fill’ game, much like a roll and write game, where the game input is simply driven by flipping cards from the top of a deck, rather than by rolling dice. This game has everything I enjoy most about roll-and-writes and flip-and-fills - the input (in this case a deck of cards) is identical for everyone, which brings a fairness to the game, but your puzzles and how you play are almost entirely your own independent game to maximise. The added joy in Get on Board, is that the actual playing space is shared between all players - something that is done by very few games in this genre. In the game, you're using the short bus routes dealt from the deck of cards to extend a single bus network across the city, picking up different types of passengers and dropping them off at the right locations around the city - optimising your route to drop multiple of the same type of passenger at points of interest , is the main way to play well. I confess that I still prefer Let’s Make a Bus Route, although my opinion is possibly a little swayed by the enjoyment of having a game that’s a little harder to find here in the UK. Drawing on the dry erase board is also a bit more tactile and closer to the roll and write genre. If you still want more roll and write style games, then Let’s Make a Bus Route the Dice Game makes a few tweaks to create a 2-player version.
Come Sail Away!
One of Saashi and Saashi’s bigger box games, where you compete to board passengers upon your luxury liner, bringing them to their favorite cabins and facilities.
And finally, if you’re a bit of a connoisseur of Saashi & Saashi games, then I’d love to know if I should be picking up Coffee Roaster, Blend Coffee Lab or Take the A Chord for my collection. And for those of us waiting patiently for more, there’s also Come Sail Away and Newsboys available at Essen 2023. Come Sail Away is a bigger box tile-placement game with Daryl Chow as a co-designer. This pairing brought us Remember our Trip and Daryl Chow has designed a number of lesser-known games I enjoy, like Wok & Roll and Overbooked, so Come Sail Away it’s certainly a game I’m on the lookout for.
