Players begin by placing ships on the island of Tonga, a tile which starts the game all by itself in the middle of the table. This sets the stage for many journeys which are to come.
When a beach becomes filled with ships, those ships are all sent to sea. For new paths, a tile is randomly drawn and placed. If it's an island tile, all ships are safe and are distributed on the beaches of the new island. If a sea tile is drawn, the ships could sink (some sea tiles are tougher to cross than others).
The goal is to have your ships on as many scoring islands as possible when the game ends.
Following is an interview with Thomas Rauscher, the designer of Tongiaki, which was published by Uberplay Entertainment.
(Some of Rauscher's favorite games are Ursuppe, Vinci, Tigris and Euphrates, Lowenherz, La Citta, Bohnanza, Can't Stop, TransAmerica, Blokus, and Anno Domini. He says he mostly enjoys games which "carry elements of cooperation or at least trading.")
When did you begin the process of designing Tongiaki?
January 2003. I can state this quite clearly because Tongiaki was inspired by reading an article in the German Magazine GEO (comparable to National Geographic) about the origins of the Polynesian culture.
How long was it before you were convinced that Tongiaki was a finished design, ready for submission to game companies?
Four months (including testing and design of a nice-looking prototype). But I must stress that this the absolute exception and I don't actually really know why Tongiaki worked so perfectly just from the start.
Did you go into the process with the idea of designing an island-themed game, or did something else originally inspire Tongiaki?
After reading the article, I started drawing the tiles. For the game mechanism, I started with the basic idea that the game should have a cooperative part -- so crossing the ocean with other players should be easier than alone. Everything else evolved out of this basic concept.
What inspired you to become a game designer?
My family says that I started to design games when I was a kid. Actually, I remember that most of these games didn't work well. My first game ever published was in a college magazine (in the late 1980s).
Have you ever travelled to the south Pacific islands?
Unfortunately not.
Regarding Tongiaki's gameplay... Being able to force other players into leaving an island makes for a lot of seemingly small decisions that can have a big impact later. Was that a goal of yours going into the design process, or did it naturally evolve to that point somehow?
As I said above, one basic idea was that it should be easier to travel together with other players than alone. This implied that you could move other players' ships. In the first game, we then saw that you could also use this to force other players to leave an island (and sink in the worst case). So it was completely a side effect.
In a couple of games, I managed to get stuck with too many of my boats still on Tonga when other players had entirely left that island. Should one early goal be to get your boats off of Tonga, almost regardless of where they go?
Mostly, but not always. If Tonga is surrounded by a fair [number] of islands, a player stuck on Tonga can try to get all of his ships on Tonga and then do a huge cascading move. This can lead to a victory (I have seen this sometimes). But if the other players are aware of this, they can block him by kinging.
What tactics or strategies would you recommend to new Tongiaki players?
There is one basic rule: If you want to stay on an island, put your own ships on the largest beach when landing and all the others players ships on the rest of the beaches.
The rest of the tactics heavily depends on the group: Tongiaki can be played cooperatively -- and it can be played more aggressively. But still one thing holds: It is a great risk to go out alone (only at the very end does it make sense), and people who try to go out alone seldom win.
Was there anything significant about Tongiaki's gameplay that changed from the time you submitted it to publishers until it was actually published?
There was a lot of fine-tuning, but the basic things were not changed. Tongiaki is also the original title I chose.
Are you working on any other games? If so, what can you tell us about them?
Tongiaki is my first game ever published, so I won't say to much about my other games where I also try to get them published. But I can tell you that most of my other games also have a historical background.
I can mention one of my games called Aquaduct, which combines a classic development game with elements of election (the setting is located in the ancient Roman Empire). Aquaduct won the first prize in the Hippodice Game Designer Contest 2003 but I did not yet find a publisher for it. It is a very complex game with a duration of 2 hours.
