Ever since I slept on Bestiary of Sigillum: Collector’s Edition a couple years ago, I decided that CrowD Games should be closer to the top of my list of favorite publishers. As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time with their catalog over the last two years, playing through every single game the team at CrowD would send my way.

With very limited exceptions, CrowD has always delivered the goods…and with the recent fulfillment of the medium weight strategy title Nippon: Zaibatsu (based on the 2015 game Nippon), I’m ready to shout it to the masses: people should be following CrowD’s every move.

About a year ago (around the time that the original Zaibatsu campaign went up on crowdfunding platforms), I began playing Nippon on Board Game Arena, mainly to see if this was the kind of game I wanted to back when the campaign for Nippon: Zaibatsu went live. I liked what I saw out of the 2015 original, enough to put down some money for a copy of Zaibatsu.

Then, life punched me in the gut. I was laid off from my full-time job, and I shut down any talk of backing not only this game, but buying any board games for a few…

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Nippon: Zaibatsu—2026’s updated version of the 2015 original, Nippon—is so hot in my gaming circles that I had the chance to play the base game three times over the course of a week, and it seemed like the game was popping up at game nights all over Chicago for the first couple months after it hit the market.

After drafting my initial review of the game, I learned that the game’s first expansion, Nippon: Genro, is hitting crowdfunding in late June of this year. A couple prototypes were floating around the US, so I reached out to CrowD Games to see if I could grab a pre-production copy to play for about a week, and I’m excited to share that CrowD obliged.

Nippon: Zaibatsu is a relatively easy game to learn, but it is a very difficult game to play well. By that, I mean that the game’s high volume of timing decisions make for a tricky gaming affair, and I’m surprised how often I had a plan to get all my ducks in a row during each play only to have an opponent snipe end-game turn order, or mid-game area control elements, or the perfect worker color for my consolidation plans just before I could.

Nippon: Zaibatsu may come across as a cutthroat area majority experience. Moving…

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