I don't like the production values in Tzaar. Sure, it works perfectly (but how embarrassing would it be to make an abstract game with production issues?) and none of the issues actually hinder gameplay, but still... Yinsh is one of the prettiest games I own. It's an abstract, but its look gives the game quite an unique feel. Everyone I've played Yinsh with compliments how nice the game looks.

The board in Yinsh is white, but it's not just white. There's a texture to it, a marble-like quality to it. In Tzaar, the board is beige. Light beige on the inside of the playing space, dark beige on the outside. That's it. Like someone made it using paintbrush, happily indulging in the "fill it with color" function (the "spilling paint can" icon). Comparing it to DVONN is even worse, since GIPF's other "disc game" has a board with a very interesting "sandy" look to it.

The playing pieces leave a little bit to be desired. The pieces in Yinsh feel really good in your hands, very tactile. The material has an almost stone-like quality to them, almost as good as the ones in Hive. Tzaar just feels like plastic. Sure, the discs stack appropriately, no problems there, but I remember in a few times when playing yinsh a player in would just take a ring from the board and spin it in his fingers, like it would help him think his next move. And, you know, it kinda felt like it did.

I should mention that one of the white tzarras came with a gold smudge on its side (I've sent a captioned picture of it to BGG, but it was denied because “it should've been sent under Creative”... WTF?) I'll see if I can scrape it off with a knife or something, because it looks really off-putting. My copy also came with one extra black tott, which I keep under the insert so it doesn't mess with the setup of the game. I'm not a big fan of the “cracked paint” look the discs have.

Also, the box art isn't as interesting as the one in Yinsh. They've thrown in a "slick new frame" around the game illustration that, while doesn't actually look bad, makes the box look too different from the Yinsh one. This is a series after all. The game does come with a folder showing the box arts of the future GIPF re-releases (and, of course, they all have that frame, with slight variations on the color) but I liked better how the series looked before. They all had a color going for it. Dvonn was red. Zertz was blue. Yinsh, white, and so on... Now they're all enclosed in a frame, like a picture. The Gipf logo now is multi-colored, one color per circle, which sort of deviates from the aesthetics of the series . In every game you have black against white. It really is the classic abstract battle. Sure, Dvonn has 3 red discs, Zertz has gray orbs, but I think that's it. Why does the logo look all kiddy with these colors?

So, after all this, why is Tzaar a 10 out of 10? The game is fantastic. It's hard to elaborate much on that (unlike all the stupid nagging in the previous paragraphs), but I'll try anyway.

Unlike Yinsh, Tzaar does not wear its complexity on its sleeve. It takes a while to see all that is behind an apparently simple move. And unlike in Yinsh, I cannot give examples as to how the game actually develops to a newbie before the game really does develop. When I explain Yinsh, I usually say that a white ring in front of a row of four black markers is usually just as dangerous as if was in front of 4 white markers. It's easy. With Tzaar, things like that would be a lot harder to show before a match.

This really isn't much of a problem, though, since most of the time the newbie asks for a re-match. Tzaar is a fast game. Matches usually last 10 to 15 minutes. Half an hour is when it drags near the end (and those tend to be the best matches). One of the times I taught this it was even a little funny, the new player lost and just started setting up the pieces again, shuffling them around a little bit for a different setup, like he was just taking the action in his turn. He didn't even ask me if I wanted a re-match, didn't even look up from the board, it was like it was a natural thing that we played this game again. I, of course, loved this. The game has a compulsive quality to it, like Tichu, I can see myself playing many matches of this game over and over and over again. Yinsh was like that the first night I got it, but ever since I've reduced my plays of it to just one per game reunion, usually. Yinsh feels ponderous and slow in comparison, matches of it usually go for at least half an hour, depending on how seriously the players are taking the match. In Yinsh, the board changes a lot and quite visibly with each action, making each turn quite AP-prone, which doesn't really happen that often in Tzaar. I think for the next few weeks (or months) I will usually choose to play best out of 3 in Tzaar before opening up Yinsh.

Even though it's definitely not an obvious game, there are many intuitive elements to the rules. The concept of capture is known to almost anybody: who has never played chess, or checkers? Chess even has the positioning element that this game has, only with a lot less dynamism. The two moves per turn really helps keep things active. I've read here on BGG that this is the most chess-like game of the GIPF series, and from what I've played I definitely agree.

Only I think this game is much better than chess. Like I've already said, it's fast. Sure, add a chess clock and you have a much quicker match of the classic, but Tzaar doesn't need this. Every turn moves the game towards its end. Every move you make you take away one piece of the board, so the game comes with a built-in timer. There's even the impossibility of the draw: if you can't make a move, you lose, so sometimes you're fighting against time itself, while the opponent can afford to just dilly-dally, waiting for you to run out of moves. That is, of course, if you don't strike him where he didn't expect and you catch a surprise victory.

And that happens a lot. There are two winning conditions to the game, sure, but it sure does feel like it's a war on four different fronts. You can't run out of tzaars, you can't run out of tzarras, you can't run out of totts, and you have to be able to make your forced capture in your next turn. All this while trying to make your opponent fail in one of those conditions. It may seem like too much, and it even could be, but the result isn't an AP-filled game, but a very psychological duel. You can't attack in an obvious manner against a clever and experienced opponent. Sneaking up on somebody is a big part of this game, since there are so many options you can't possibly predict your opponents turn perfectly in most of the game, specially since there are two actions and they can be strategically combined to try to cripple you in your next turn: it's awesome to see the glint of a player's eye when they first figure out they can capture an enemy piece while aligning theirs in order to stack their tall tzaar in a good spot.

Aligning pieces is quite the strategic element in this game. Like I said, in every move you make, you move the game toward its end: you take away a piece from the board (either literally, in a capture, or by making it disappear, under a stack). You can't just move to an empty space, waiting for a next turn to unfold before you act. In fact, the manual even says this: once a space is emptied, it is never filled again.

A lot of games evolve into very fun fights. It's very common having a big tzaar stack chasing another, just wreaking havoc among the unstacked discs that were unluckily set up in their paths. A friend of mine even commented that it was like a fight between Godzilla and Mothra. Never thought you'd hear that from an abstract, huh?