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A side benefit of these hosting efforts has been the discovery of unexpected gaming partners, with the games often serving as a tool that can connect people who otherwise can't communicate effectively. (I'm not the gabbiest person when not on camera, and many students have had limited English abilities or have taken a while to make friends their own age, playing games with surrogate dad on evenings and weekends until that happens.)
Our newest exchange student comes from Thailand, and Lisa's conversational English is limited, but she's been an eager player — as long as I choose titles with minimal rule sets that I can demonstrate as much by doing as by explaining. The biggest hit so far as been FILLIT, a 2-4 player abstract strategy game from Ryo Nakamura (中村 良) that was first released in Japan by radiuthree in 2018. Japon Brand is bringing the title to SPIEL '19, and I've played nine times so far, with Lisa being an opponent in all games across all player counts.
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Team game
Your goal in FILLIT is simple: Place all of your tokens on the board first. On a turn, you do two things in either order:
• Move your pawn in a straight line on the board until it hits a wall, a stone, or another player's pawn, placing one of your tokens on each empty space that you moved on. If another player's token is on a space that you moved across or stopped on, then return that player's token to them and replace it with one of your own.
• Move one of your stones to an adjacent space on the game board. If that space is occupied, whether with a token, a pawn, or another stone, swap the contents of the two spaces.
Players keep taking turns until someone wins. You adjust the number of tokens in play based on the player count, and with four players, you play in teams of two, with each of you having a pawn on the board but only two colors of tokens. (The game board is double-sided, with a miniature board on one side in case you want to play a complete game with two or three players in only five minutes instead of 10-15 minutes.)
Three-player game
Gameplay is simple, right? Make a move that maximizes the number of tokens that you place — except that you need to play defense against opponents who are doing the same thing. The more that you can block them with your pawn or stones or force them to retrace steps they've already taken, the better your chances of winning.
The early stages of the game — that is, the first two or three turns — can be simple since you're starting with an empty board and multiple options for movement. Lay down three or four tokens on fresh ground as if you're back in Crush Roller from decades past or dropped into Splatoon today, then you start butting heads with the enemy, undoing their work to claim that ground for yourself.
Over nine games, I feel that I've gotten better at playing, but evidence of that isn't present in the video below. In some games, a few of your stones feel useless, having been pushed to the edge to divert an opponent's movement, but then abandoned after that. At other times, you're forced to make a move to block an opponent or push tokens back into their reserve in order not to lose, then another, then another, and eventually the stones run out, the dam breaks, and you lose. I don't know whether that's just the nature of the game or me not making the best moves that will keep more options open in the future. Time will tell...
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