I met Olli today at 9 am to try my brand new copy of Kahuna. I’m doing a translation of it, it’s going to be one of a bunch of Kosmos two-player games Marektoy is publishing at some point next year. Of course I needed to get some hands on experience of the game!
I like it. Fighting for the archipelago is fun and somewhat tricky. The cards allow for lots of possibilities — it seems to be a rare situation where a card is useless. I did end up discarding one card during the game, and I did realize the situations where not taking a card might be a good thing.
The score? After my last turn before the first scoring, I was leading 4-2 in Kahuna stones. However, Olli had a turn and he promptly reduced it to 3-3 tie. No points. In the second phase, my game started falling apart: Olli attacked me while I couldn’t do much against his island network. At the second scoring, Olli was leading 7-4. Since that scored him two game points, I would need to reverse that to gain a victory. So, I wasn’t surprised when I lost the game 3-0 in the end.
It was fun, trying to work out the best attacks, but in the last phase the game was already quite locked up. Achieving anything was very hard and took lots of cards. If that remains so, my appreciation of the game will definitely go down. Right now, I’m still learning the game. Oh, and the play time could certainly go down: our game took almost 45 minutes. A bit too much, I think.
One response to “Kahuna”
I’m playing a few games of this over at http://www.yucata.de, and I’m enjoying them quite a bit. I haven’t played enough to comment on the endgame, other than to say it has been a bit anticlimatic so far.
One thing about playing it there — with the exception of the cards your opponent draws from the deck, all information is openly displayed. There is even a chart indicating what cards have been played. I’m a terrible card counter so I like this feature.