The One Hundred Torii Review

Games that give me a sense of zen are pretty great, and that is what I expected as I unboxed The One Hundred Torii and got it setup on the table. When you first get the game out of the box, there might seem like a ton is going on. You have small tokens, larger tokens, people tokens, people banners, and so much more. The game was overwhelming to setup, but was the gameplay any good? Let’s dive into The One Hundred Torii and take a look!

You can watch a full How to Play video from our good friend Rodney Smith below!

Object of the Game

In The One Hundred Torii, players will be traveling around a garden they are actively creating, collecting six different landmark tokens, walking through torii (gates), and getting the help of various characters. The game goes around and around the table until there are no more tiles left in the draw pile when someone needs to draw a tile.

During the game, players will take actions across 4 phases – (1) gaining help from characters, (2) exploring the garden, (3) gaining rewards, and (4) drawing a new tile. Players will generally always have a hand of two tiles, and in most cases, they will play one tile to the table, attempting to score tokens by creating paths. When a tile is laid, the player choses a landmark symbol on the tile, and then traces a path from that symbol to the CLOSEST matching symbol. The closest symbol could be on the next tile over, or better for the player, many tiles away. While tracing this path, players will keep track of how many red and blue torii gates they pass through.

How it Works

Just for creating the path, players receive a token that matches the landmark they selected. They then receive additional tokens of that landmark equal to the number of red gates they passed through. They then count up the number of blue gates they passed through, and take that many tokens from the other 5 landmark types. Why are we gathering all these tokens? That is where scoring points and gaining rewards comes in.

On their own, tokens don’t score any points, and can simply be used as currency to purchase the help of a character (phase 1). However, once a player collects 5 of any of the landmarks, they turn those 5 tokens in during the gain rewards phase (phase 3), and collect the 5 point symbol token of that landmark type. Should they cash in 5 tokens of that type again, they simply flip their large scoring token from 5 to 10. The maximum number of points you can earn per landmark is 10.

There are other ways to earn points as well. Each time you use the benefits a character supplies, you will take (or flip, if it’s your second time using that character) the matching character card. The first time you use the character you earn 2 points, the second time you will flip the tile to show 4 points, and if you are the FIRST to use a character a third time, you get the exclusive character bonus, which will earn you 3 points at the end of the game.

Players will continue going around the table collecting tokens, gaining rewards, and expanding the garden until the game ends, after which they tally up all their points and a winner is declared!

Is it Good?

You’d be forgiven if you looked at the box and components and expected a zen-like experience. This is far from that. Although the gameplay here is fairly simplistic, there is a lot of strategy in how and when you place specific tiles. Trying to maximize the number of gates you pass through can be a pretty tough exercise, and as the board grows larger and larger, your options become fewer and fewer, requiring a bit of trickery to make the best path. That “trickery” comes from the various characters you can hire.

Hiring characters not only gets you character points for the end of the game, but also allows you to do some pretty powerful stuff, like placing a tile on top of another tile (generally not allowed), or placing the poet on the board to cover up a landmark icon. How you use the characters will likely decide your fate in the game. I went the route of using as many characters as possible to attempt and score points with them, but this proved pretty useless as I was minimizing the number of token points I was earning. Ultimately, I lost. The other players who balanced their approach fared much better, only using characters when necessary, and very strategically.

There is one type of person I wouldn’t want to play The One Hundred Torii with. Those that need to analyze every possible move before actually doing something would become a huge problem in this game. Since player points are public, you can always see how far behind you potentially are. That provides ample opportunity for certain individuals to attempt to maximize every turn. While this might be good for their final score, it could become a huge drag on the rest of the people around the table. If you have a board game friend who plays this way, I’d recommend not brining this one to the table.

My group attempted to play good tiles, and always took a little bit of time deciding. But never once did any of us sit there and start counting points out to make sure we were maximizing our turns. If a turn felt good to do, we did it. Sure, you might not win every time with that attitude, but you will get invited back to board game night, and that’s a pretty good win!

Overall, The One Hundred Torii is a pretty strong, tile laying game. There is a lot more strategy then you might think, so don’t expect a zen experience here. This can be rather stressful, but since the concept works very well, it’s a great game to play again and again.