A few months ago, I earned the the dubious honor of having the most recorded plays of Mottainai and its expansion Wutai Mountain. Maybe I will write a proper review of this expansion one day, but its been a while so I decided to publish the jumbled notes I sketched out after this great accomplishment.
If Mottainai is a knife fight, then Wutai Mountain is a bruising boxing match. This expansion is a bit swingier. The OM cards drain your hand which takes time to refill. If you play (and fill up) a powerful OM card, the final beatdown could be foreshadowed several turns before the inevitable. Such advance signaling is not as common in the base game.
The game with the expansion is considerably heavier than the original. Jumping from 3 to 4 (on the five point complexity scale on boardgamegeek) feels accurate. The expanded game is less heavy than Pax Porfiriana, but it now fits comfortably within the category of ridiculously heavy card game in a really small box.
I have to admit that plays 10 thru 25 were a bit of a slog. The extra heaviness got wearying after the initial novelty of the OM cards faded out. I almost stopped playing the expansion, but I hit a second wind where everything clicked and I burst through a wild run of plays over a single weekend. The OM mechanism is still ponderous, but my mind now groks its intricacies. It helped that I realized that one can win a Wutai game without ever completing an OM work (maybe up to a third of such games).
My personal boardgamegeek rating for this game has followed this trajectory, I started with an 8, dropped it to a 6, and have settled at a 7. I’m not sure if the expansion improves the base game, but it is a solid alternate game that uses Mottainai cards. This is not a must-have, and I would recommend playing the original fifty times before trying this out. Now that I’m standing on top of both play count lists at boardgamegeek, I’m not sure whether I would choose play the base game or the expansion more regularly.
When I was shopping for a car after college, I decided to get an old Datsun sports car. I eventually settled on a 1981 280zx 2+2 with a back seat. Since I didn’t drink, the backseat got quite a bit of use since I was often the designated driver. Before I made that final purchase, I tried out an early model 240z, which felt like a completely different vehicle. I occasionally wonder if I made a mistake getting the Fat Elvis version, even though the back seat gave me the opportunity to transport four friends to Sacramento to watch Melt Banana.
Unlike the 280zx, my experience with Wutai Mountain was unfortunately all by myself, playing against myself. Even if I don’t play it more, this expansion be inextricably tied to memories 2020, navigating the lonely vagaries of this drawn out pandemic.
The night after, I played both versions, twice.
It was relaxing to return to the base game. There are fewer unknowns to ponder in the base game without the OM deck. The patterns in a hand are much easier to analyze at a glance with the base game.
If someone wants an experience with wild variety, I see why they might prefer Wutai. After all, this is the point of the expansion. However, I’m not sure that’s what I want out of a cardgame.
Fortunately both decks fit in the box, so they are both always available.
A couple nights later, I had another opportunity to play the base game and the expansion in quick succession.
I think my earlier analogy is correct. To take it to extremes, the base game is like getting on a Kawasaki to race around an oval track. Adding Wutai Mountain turns it into a meandering stroll through the woods.
Wutai constipates your hand in two ways – you need to have cards in hand to fill up an OM card when you initially play that card. And then having emptied your hand to stock up the OM card, you need to fill your hand back up. It’s not a bad dynamic, but it is a fundamental change from the base game.
A few days later.
I’d say the appropriate aphorism is “more is more, but not necessarily better (or worse)”.
After two hundred plays, maybe I’ll come to consider Wutai as mean and nasty as the base game. However, currently Wutai has a expansive meandering quality that is enjoyable in its own way.
I hit 250 plays for Mottainai and 50 for Wutai.
My final verdict is that is that Wutai does some cute things, but if I wanted to slow down Mottainai, I’d just play Innovation.
Mottanai is fast and viscous. That’s the raison d’etre of this game. I’ll keep Wutai in the box for easy variety, but it generally isn’t worth the loss of quickness and lightness. (I should reread the Italo Calvino’s first two essays in Six Memos for the Next Millennium).
The thrill of Mottanai is derived from the suddenness of the game end, which often comes as a thief in the night. One misstep can set up the sudden victory for your opponent. Delightful surprises reveal themselves. Swift game endings do not happen regularly in the expansion. Furthermore, the base game commonly scores as a tie, with the tiebreaker being whoever ended the game. This dynamic makes it important to be the person who ends the game, and it is often worth the risk the game prematurely even if you don’t have a guaranteed victory. Wutai’s final scores are generally lopsided which eliminates this delicious dynamic.
In any case, I suspect Wutai will end up like Nefarious, a game with a ton of plays in one year and not many after. Mottanai will remain a classic.
I haven’t played this game in the past few months. The I Ching and reading books in general has taken up all my free time when I’m not playing with the kids. Mottainai is great, but not as fun as plumbing the craggy depths of my brain.