Suujin Taisen is a "vs. puzzle game". What that really means is that, it is a board/tile game in which the players play tiles onto the board in order to outscore their opponents. Think of a merge of mahjong, Pipe Dream, and Scrabble.
Each player has a hand of 5 tiles, and they take turns playing one tile to the board every turn. Each tile has a number 1 to 5, and 1 to 4 legs for connecting to other tiles and scoring points. There are 4 possible ways of scoring points for a connection:
You can play against the computer, or you can play via wireless or Wifi against human opponents. There is a story mode, and you can also play freely customized vs. computer matches. The computer player (even at the strongest level) is quite weak, but the game against human players is quite tense. However, the Wifi is under-populated. There are a total of over 60 different boards to play on. There is also a puzzle mode, in which you try to achieve the target score by playing tiles from a fixed selection. The touch screen controls are very smooth; everything is accomplished easily, and 'control miss' is very rare.
This is a very good game. Seriously. I heartily recommend this game to every player who likes games of strategy, as long as they don't mind some element of luck in the game. On a scale of 0 to 10, I give this game a score of 11 ('exceptional') if you can find friends to play against, or 9 if you can't. In my opinion, this is the best NDS game to date. And I'm not alone in this opinion; Suujin Taisen has got a very high rating on ndsmk2 (a Japan player-contributed review site).
In terms of graphics and music, this game's is functional; quite stylish in my opinion, but the primary appeal of the game is in the game play.
While being a game of mixed strategy and luck, the luck factor is not too high (lower than mahjong and backgammon), because the four ways of scoring gives you a chance with most hands:
... and even if your hand is poor, you can try to buy time by playing defensively (blocking your opponent's formation).
A side note: a minority of players say that the game is 'not very interesting' or 'too much luck', but I suspect that their opinion is due to their missing a key point in the strategy: Loops are not the only main way of scoring big points in the game, for Sequences are also very prominent. For more details on this issue, please see my Sequence strategy guide.
Copyright 30 Apr 2008 Alan Shiu Ho Kwan
Alan Kwan / tarot@netvigator.com / created 30 Apr 2008