Game Title : Bean Stalk
Publisher : Freekick from a planet
Game Designer : Yoshito Terashima
Game Thema : resource management got from the orbital elevater
Game Components
1 orbital elevater board
4 types of resouce tokens
variety of buildings
1 rulebook
Beanstalk is a kind of resource management game.
Background story is based on a orbital lift built on Southern island.
Now, the island has many resources coming down by the lift. So, there are big business chances around the lift.
The game is played by players’ turns. Each player turn is composed of dropping phase, storaging phase, then building phase.
In dropping phase, 2 resources come down by the lift. There are 4 types of resources coded by color. If one type of resource make a continuous group composed of more then 4 resources, they are moved to the storage. This is very similar to the PC game “ Tetris ”.
Then, each player has a chance to get resources from the storage if he has a suitable building for the resources in the storage.
Finally, if you would like to build new building, you can pay the resources in your hand and build the building. Every building has its unique ability to get resources or some other useful function.
The game can be finished in several manners. If the resources are used out, the game ends. Also, if the dropped resources reach the top of the lift board, the game ends like “ Tetris ”.
Anyway, once the game ends, every player counts up his victory points. Basically, if you have one resource of each color, you get 1 victory point.
Actually, the game is slow-going from the start to the end. Only 2 resources come down along the lift for all period. Though in the end every player has variety of building, the game is not so exciting due to this limitation of resource supply. In other words, if someone has a big lead in the middle of the game, it is very difficult for other players to catch him up. But, the game continues to the end with constant slow-going pace.
I think this is a serious problem for this game.
I really like the theme of the game. I like variety of interesting fuctions of the buildings. But, I could not feel this game is exciting because of slow-going repetitive procedure.
For the excitement, I strongly recommend the other game from the same designer, “ Terraformer ”.
