Designer: Kao Chu Kan Published by: Soso Games Number of players: 2-4 Age range: 14+ Duration: 90 minutes (our game lasted 110-115 minutes) Played on a preview copy provided by Taiwan Board Games
Formosa Tea was originally released around 2019 and I remember seeing it in Essen. The original Taiwanese version was produced by Soso and the English version by Tasty Minstrel Games. Both had low print runs and were never reprinted, making the game hard to get hold of. The new KS project brings the game back to the market and offers some new rules to tighten up the game a bit. I was sent an advance copy of the game (the original version with new rules and some new parts, to be exact) to try out. For your information, I have never owned or reviewed the original version, and although I have played it once for the record, I didn’t remember many of the details of the game. So the game was basically new to me when I played it last week.
Synopsis from the publisher:
Taiwan’s subtropical climate and environment make it extremely suitable for growing the highest quality tea. However, it wasn’t until the 19th century, when British businessman John Dodd discovered Taiwan’s excellent oolong tea, that Taiwan’s tea business really blossomed, and “Formosa Tea” became world famous.
In Formosa Tea, players become tea plantation owners and compete to harvest the best tea leaves, improve tea processing techniques, and produce the highest quality tea leaves for domestic as well as international markets. With a unique worker placement and worker promotion mechanics, along with tea drying and flavoring processing, players must use their workers wisely to produce the best tea leaves on the market.
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A game of Formosa Tea is played in four rounds. In each round, players take turns performing one of five actions.
1) Send Workers to Harvest Tea Leaves – Place your workers on the tea spaces to collect all cubes of one color or collect one of every available color cube. There is an associated water level (shown in the top tile of the column) and all tea cubes maintain the same water value. Additionally, after harvesting the tea leaves, all players who have workers on the corresponding processing line (to the right of the tea leaf harvesting area) can move their workers forward.
2) Send your workers to the tea processing factory. Place your workers on the track and move tea cubes of the same color into the factory while maintaining the same water level. Then perform the action of the space on the track that the worker is on. There are various actions such as drying the tea, scenting the tea, and more.
3) Once the tea processing is complete, collect your workers from the tea factory. Rate the quality of the tea for that particular factory: a total water level of 3+ is bad tea, 1-2 is fair tea, and 0 is good tea. This earns you bonus points. Oddly, the current art layout has the levels arranged unintuitively as “bad/good/fair”, so be sure to place your cubes in the right place. Your workers will be collected and will be in your supply again, so you can use them again this turn.
4) Send a worker to sell your tea at the International Market. Place your market in the bottom right selling area, exchange the cubes shown on one of the cards in the right-most column of the card, and gain VP for the card. If you used regular or good tea, you keep the card for bonus points at the end of the game (if you used bad tea, you don’t keep the card). Most cards also come with a bonus reward action, which you can take. The first person to do this each round can take two export actions with one worker.
5) Send workers to sell tea to the domestic market – You need to sell 2-3 cubes to move the domestic market truck. You will get bonuses when you pass certain spaces on the truck. Depending on your progress on the truck, you will get VP at the end of the game.
Once all players have finished their actions, the Management round begins. Resolve the Historical Event cards for that round. These all represent things that actually happened in Taiwanese history, so this part of the game is a bit educational. The Tea Master then moves forward as many tracks as there are workers in his or her farm’s row. Take an action on every space you enter, if you wish. All workers return, the tea farm’s weather tiles are moved, and new tea cubes are placed. Finally, the Merchant cards are replenished.
The player with the most prestige points after the 4th round (4/5/6 rounds for 4/3/2 players) wins.
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As you can see from the short description above, this is a worker placement game with multiple areas on the board to send workers to. Many of the actions have both primary and secondary effects, so a lot of planning is required. For example, placing a worker to harvest tea leaves will allow all players with workers in that row to advance their workers on the associated tea processing track. As another example, processing tea may also give you a bonus to advance the tea technology track.
The game is certainly a fairly complex size, and although the box says it’s a 60-90 minute game, there’s a lot to take into account so I wouldn’t be surprised if the game crossed the 2 hour barrier. But that’s not a negative, it just comes with all the things to consider. You often have to plan some moves in advance and it takes a while to work out all the possibilities.
I think the game would be better with player aids. My copy of the game did not have any aids, but again, I’m playing a pre-production version, so the components I have are obviously not the final version. There are many things players can recall to speed up their decision-making process. The themes in Formosa Tea are pervasive, and I think this consistent theme helps you understand the game. The game mechanics make sense to me, and they really helped me understand what to do in this fairly complex game.
If you’re familiar with the original game, we’ll give you an overview of the rules that may look new to you.
Main changes
Export bonus actions are now tied to the type of merchant card achieved instead of the three action spots on the previous game map. A special export space that allows one player to export twice in Tea Master. Merchant cards do not replenish until the cleanup phase.
There are only 4 rounds in the game. In a 3/4p game, you only have 4 workers of your color, so you don’t have many turns, so make sure you make the most of your turns. Timing your tea is key, because finishing it returns your worker to your hand and you get an extra action that round. Also, understanding how to chain actions (or gain extra actions by moving your worker forward on the factory track) is crucial to your overall success. It’s a complex puzzle, but one that’s a lot of fun to solve.
Timing forces you to make tough decisions throughout the game. You might want to rush to your plantation to get the best tea cubes. But it might be advantageous to place your workers in the production area first so that any player can move their trucks freely when they have collected that type of tea. Also, some merchant cards offer higher payouts than others, so there’s competition, so you’ll feel time pressure to decide when to sell your tea.
I hope to get this on the table again in the coming weeks, but wanted to post this now as the KS campaign should be starting soon. It’s too early to judge, but the fact that I’m hoping to get this on the table again gives me hope.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tbdgames/formosa-tea
Until your next reservation,
Gaming Doctor
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