BUY

Oshi, the game of influence, is a board game with a very nice feel to it. It has a simple layout and a straightforward style of gameplay. The main point is to use your pieces to push your opponents pieces off the board. This is pretty nice because for those that know a little bit of Japanese would know that Oshi means “push”.

The board is a wooden square divided up into a grid. On each side, there are small markers on the board itself that shows players that haven’t played before where their pieces are supposed to go. The pieces are designed to have a set number of levels. The smallest piece has one layer and can move one square in any direction. The two level pieces can move two squares in any direction, and, of course, the three layer pieces can move three squares in any direction. By any direction, that means forward, back, left, or right. The trick is that a piece can only move in one direction per turn.

Another thing about the pieces is how they can push each other. A one-layer piece can push one other piece. Two layer pieces can move up to two, and, of course, three layer pieces can move up to three other pieces. The pushed pieces can be your own to get your key pieces out of danger or multiple pieces of your opponent’s to try and get a big score. Score is the important part of this game; you need 7 points to win the game. Again, one layer pieces are worth one point and so on.

The game is actually pretty simple to play, like I described above. It is a strategy game that does require some thinking. It’s no where near as complex as Go or even chess, but it can be a little more difficult than checkers. It has potential to become a classic kid’s game, while still being something older kids and even teenagers and adults would enjoy.

My own experience with this game was unwrapping it and playing with a few of my friends. We’re all in college and supposedly smart and most of us enjoy doing logic puzzles, yet we managed to find enough challenge in this simple yet addicting board game while playing against each other to play game after game for a couple hours. We managed to find some of the best ways to get out of situations that appeared a lot, like learning when it was a good idea to move our own pieces or even sacrificing a piece of ours for the sake of taking more points from the other player.

For puzzle game fans, this is a definite buy. You can find it in most online stores for $19-$30, which makes it a good price for such an addicting board game.

Review product was provided by Starlit Citadel, and does not affect the outcome of this review.