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Amazon.com Search | |  | Rio Grande | Home » » » Asara Family Game | | | | | | | Description: | | Famed designing duo Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling will have a new title out from German publisher Ravensburger in time for Spiel 2010: Asara which is subtitled Land of 1000 Towers .... Compete with your fellow players for the most beautiful towers. Players take on the roles of famous architects and using their chicanery, try to obtain the best construction parts. With these the exuberant towers are erected. Think ahead, use your tactical sense and it will help you to stay ahead of the other players and thereby becoming the greatest architect of the country. Exciting construction entertainment for the whole family. | | | Features: | |
• ASARA offers an exciting game play and new challenges with each turn in every game - but with simple rules
• Contents: 1 game board, 4 scoring counters, 1 year counter, 52 Asari-coins, 100 tower pieces, 4 observation barriers, 45 merchant cards, instructions, overview guide
• 2-4 players
• Playing time: 45-60 minutes
| | | Product Details: | | | Product Length:
| 12.0 inches | | Product Width:
| 12.0 inches | | Product Height:
| 2.75 inches | | Product Weight:
| 3.7 pounds | | Package Length:
| 11.7 inches | | Package Width:
| 11.7 inches | | Package Height:
| 2.8 inches | | Package Weight:
| 3.85 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 15 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 15 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 Take your time with the rules and you will be fine!Jan 23, 2012
By Tark Mwain
"Mas"
Your family will enjoy this game. It is highly acclaimed, as evidenced by it being a finalist for Game of the Year.
In regards to the previous commenter, perhaps referring to the components when working through the manual will aid your comprehension. For us, and those we regularly game with, the rules were NOT a problem. Take your time reading and you will be fine.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Nice addition to a game library but not a good first eurogame.May 02, 2012
By Megan Ellinger
If you are already comfortable with the mechanics of a variety of Eurogames, you'll enjoy this game quite a bit. The instructions are simple and the game is fairly quick with 2 players. It relies primarily on strategy and thinking ahead toward the end of the end of the game but the nice theme kept the actual gameplay fun.
If you are new to Eurogames or haven't played anything beyond Monopoly, Life, etc, this will be a stretch for you. I'd recommend going with something more like Carcassone, Ticket to Ride, or Settlers of Catan to learn some basic mechanics before taking on a more complicated game like this.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 For Gamers, Boring - For Families, ComplicatedMay 16, 2012
By S. Rudge
We played this game with two different groups of people. The first, a hard-core gaming group who meets weekly and often play games exactly like this. The second was with a family who plays games, but tends not to get into the more complicated ones. For this group something like the "Ticket to Ride" board game is probably about the most complex, yet still very enjoyable for them.
The Gamers comment:
The game is a very bland and unexciting worker placement style game. This is a game where you have a limited number of "workers," in this case cards, which you spend each round to gather resources (building pieces). The cost of various building pieces is determined by the first player to use the resource space. This makes it difficult to plan ahead, becoming a not engaging exercise in trying to get the one or two items that might be useful in a future turn. More likely you'll end up with useless pieces. Overall, for the time and cost commitment, there are better options out there for worker placement games. Among the recommendations, "Egizia", "Hansa Teutonica", or "Caylus" are good if you like this style of game.
The Family comments:
"Asara" doesn't seem to be a game designed for this type of player. It is a little more complicated to get going than they usually like. The youngest player in this group was 12 which is within the age range suggested by the game. Unlike the Gamers, who play games often enough to intuitively figure out the rules using the instructions more to answer questions than to learn the game, the Family relies heavily on the instructions and the game sort of putters along as they figure things out. By the time they had figured out "Asara," there was not much enthusiasm for it. The Family likes games they can get into fairly quickly which encourage a lot of discussion during game play time and are enjoyed by younger players as much as adults. When a game like that is found it is pulled out and played over and over again. This game will not be one of those.
Admittedly, for this review the game was played by opposite ends of the gaming spectrum so there may be a middle area which may find it quite enjoyable. I would recommend checking other reviews for other opinions from different types of game players to figure out if you might like this game or not.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Fun and simple but complicated rulesMay 05, 2012
By Irene Watson
We haven't played a game like this for a long time so it took a little while to get into it. It took a bit longer to figure out the rules and sometimes became a challenge. We played the regular game rather than the "professional" because we wanted to focus on learning about it first. A few more games and we will be ready to move up.
Once we understood the game, it became fun and moved along quickly. I can see it would be a fun game to play as a family of young children. It is simple enough to encourage a 6-year old to enjoy it but I do suggest an adult fully understand the rules before attempting to teach a youngster.
Simple concept, potential for deep gameplayMay 18, 2012
By Grieger
Asara's an interesting game that starts with a simple concept: build towers. The towers in question are assemblies of cardboard counters with different colors and sections that you need to put together to make the tallest towers you can. But, it's a bit more complicated than that in the end since it's not simply about building a single tower as big as you can get. It's more about deciding the size and number of towers while managing a limited number of turns and of course other players.
Main Game Mechanic
The game covers four years within which each player gets a number of turns to try to buy tower parts and assemble towers. Turns are based on a set of buyers represented by half-sized playing cards. The "suits" are different colored pictures of a figure representing a buyer. By placing a buyer in a slot on the board, you enable yourself to access whatever section of the board (and thus function) it belongs to. For example, if you want to buy the base for a new tower you want to build, you'll place a buyer card in one of the slots adjacent to the tower base "market". The first person to place a colored card sets the suit for that market for that year. So, if you place a blue card down, all other players need to place a blue card from their own hand in order to access that market. If you don't have the color you need, you can place two cards of any suit face down in a slot in that market. This effectively adds an additional cost and a layer of strategy to the acquisition of tower parts. The act of buying a part (or paying for some other actions) requires coins (in form of varied denominations of cardboard counters made to look like coins) which you get a small supply of each year (you can obtain more but at the cost of your buyers). You ultimately pay for everything you do. Want tower parts? Buyer + coins. Want to build that tower? Buyer + coins.
A year ends when all players have run out of buyers. Points are tallied based on the number of towers, gold decorations (some parts have them), and whether or not you're the first player to go (something you can use a buyer to take for yourself). The parts markets are restocked, buyers are collected, shuffled and redistributed, and you get another allocation of "coins".
After the fourth year, points are awarded based on who has the tallest and second tallest tower of a particular color (parts for each color vary in price so the higher priced parts result in higher point awards in the end) as well as who has the tallest overall tower and the most towers total.
Potential for Deep Gameplay
At first, the game seems pretty straight forward, you build towers, you can find plenty of parts and there are ways to get more of just about anything (need more coins, use a buyer to "buy" coins). But, in the end, the combination of a set number of buys and a set number of coins required to get the parts and build the towers you want to build creates just enough competition and limits resources enough to make things challenging. Then you start to realize there are more competitive strategies you can start trying to get what you need and make life harder for the competition. I won't go into detail since half the fun is realizing it after playing a game or two.
Worth Getting?
In the end, the "family" game moniker speaks to the demographic. This game is about having a great time playing something that isn't too complicated and doesn't take a lot of time (once you know what you're doing and if everyone's quick, you can probably crank through a game in 30-40 minutes...but why rush? :) ). There's enough to give you something to do beyond just following the rules and getting to the end of the game. Taking advantage of turn order and resource limitations, you can make your life a bit easier and everyone else's harder. And, with the various ways to earn points, in particular at the end of the game, there's enough leeway to keep the game from becoming too competitive.
If you're looking for a nice game that's well done (the only down side in my mind is that the instructions can be a bit confusing in places and some major aspects of scoring in the end game are represented as a couple of bullet points amidst a lot of other text), this is definitely worth the buy. It's not crazy involved or complicated as a game like Android would be but still has enough depth so the game isn't too simple with a limited amount of randomness.
See all 15 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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