Formosa Tea

• Designer: Kao Chu Kan
• Publisher: Soso Games
• Players 2-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 90 minutes (our game was 110-115 mins)
• Played with preview copy provided by Taiwan Boardgames

Formosa Tea was originally released around 2019 and I remember seeing it at Essen. The original Taiwanese version was done by Soso, and the English version was done by Tasty Minstrel Games. It seems like both had small print runs, and there wasn’t a reprint done, so this game was hard to get a hold of. There is a new KS project to bring the game back to the market and offer a few new rules to tighten the game up a bit. I was sent an advance copy of the game (Well, actually an original version with the new rules and some new bits) to try out. FWIW, I never owned nor reviewed the original version, and while my records say that I played it once, I didn’t recall many of the details of the game – so essentially the game was new to me when I played it last week.

The synopsis from the publisher:

The sub-tropical climate and environment of Taiwan makes the island highly suitable for cultivating top quality tea. But it wasn’t not until the 19th century after English businessman John Dodd discovered some amazing Oolong tea there that the Taiwanese tea business truly begin to bloom and “Formosa Tea” became world-renowned.

In Formosa Tea, players are tea farm owners competing to harvest the best tea leaves, improve their tea processing techniques, and produce tea of the highest quality for not only the domestic market but also for the international market. With the unique worker placement and worker advancement mechanisms, along with the tea dehydration and scenting processing, players must use their workers wisely to make the best tea in the market.
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A game of Formosa Tea is played in four rounds. In each round, players take turns to perform one of the five possible actions:

1] Send a worker to harvest tea leaves – place a worker on a tea space, collect all the cubes of one color or one cube of every color available. There is an associated water level (seen on the tile at the top of the column), and all the tea cubes keep the same water value. Additionally, after tea is collected, all players who have a worker in the matching processing line (to the right of the tea harvesting area) get to move their worker forward.

2] Send a worker to a tea factory to process tea leaves – place a worker on the track and then move matching color tea cubes to the factory, again keeping the same water level. Then take the action of the space on the track where your worker is; there are multiple different actions to dry the tea, scent the tea or other things.

3] Retrieve a worker from the tea factory after tea processing is completed – Evaluate the quality of your tea of that particular factory. If the total water level is 3+, it is poor tea; if is is 1-2, then it is normal tea, and if is 0, then it is good tea – you will score bonus points for this. Weirdly, the current art layout has the levels in a non-intuitive arrangement of poor/good/normal. So be sure you put the cubes in the right place! You do get your worker back, so you can use it again this turn as it is once again in your supply

4] Send a worker to sell tea in the international market – place a market in the selling area in the bottom right, trade in cubes as seen on one of the cards in the rightmost column of cards, and score the VPs on the card. If you use normal or good tea, you keep the card for possible end game bonus points (you do not keep the card if you use bad tea). Most cards also come with a bonus reward action which you now take. The first person to do this each round can make two export actions with their one worker.

5] Send a worker to sell tea the domestic market – sell 2 to 3 cubes to move on the Domestic market track. There are bonuses that you get as you pass certain spaces on the track. You will score VPs in the end game based on your progress on the track

When all players have taken all their actions, there is an admin round. You resolve the historical event card for the round – these all represent things which actually happened in Formosan history, so this part of the game also is a bit educational. Tea masters then move forward on their tracks equal to the workers in their plantation row; taking the actions of all the spaces they enter if they wish. All the workers come back, the weather tiles are moved in the tea plantations and new tea cubes are placed. Finally, the merchant cards are replenished.

After the end of the fourth round  (There are 4/5/6 rounds for 4/3/2 players.), the player who has the most prestige points wins!

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As the short description above shows, this is a worker placement game with multiple areas on the board for you to send your workers. Many of the actions have both primary and secondary effects, so you have a lot of planning to do. For example, when you place a worker to harvest tea leaves, all players who have a worker in that row get to advance a worker on the associate tea processing track. As another example, when you process tea, you might also get a bonus to advance on the Tea Technology track as well.

The game is definitely on the more complex size, and man, I know the box says this 60-90 min game, but there are a lot of things to consider, so it would not surprise me for your game to push the two hour barrier. But – that’s not a negative; that’s just representative of all of the things you need to consider. You often have to plan a few moves in advance, and this will take a bit of time to work out all the possibilities.

I will say that I feel the game would improve with player aids; my copy of the game did not have any – but again, I am playing off of a pre-production copy so the components I have are clearly not final. There are a lot of things which players could be reminded of to speed up their decision making process. The theme in Formosa Tea is pervasive, and I think this cohesive theme helps you comprehend the game. As game mechanics just make sense to me, that really did help me figure out what to do in this fairly complicated game.

If you are familiar with the original game, then let me outline the rules which appear new:

MAJOR CHANGES

1. The bonus action for Export is now tied to the type of Merchant cards you fulfill instead of the three action spots on the previous game map.
2. A special Export space that allows one player to export twice with their Tea Master.
3. The Merchant cards won’t be replenished until the Cleanup Phase.

There are only four rounds in the game, and in a 3/4p game, you only get 4 workers in your color. So, you don’t have that many turns to take – so make the most of them! Timing the completion of your tea is vital as this gets a worker back in your hand thus giving you an extra action in the round… Also figuring out how to chain actions together (or get extra actions through the advancement of your workers on the factory track) is vital to overall success. It does make for a complex puzzle, but one very satisfying to figure out.

Timing creates tough decisions throughout the game. You might want to rush to the plantations to get the best tea cubes. But you might benefit from having a worker in the production area first to take advantage of the free track movement when any player collects tea of that type. You will also face some time pressure deciding when to sell your tea as there is some competition for the merchant cards as some provide better payout than others.

I hope to get this to the table again in the coming weeks, but I wanted to post this now as the KS campaign should be kicking off soon. It’s too early to give a rating, but the fact that I want to get it to the table again is promising.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tbdgames/formosa-tea

Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor