This post is very brief because information on Kairo is very limited. It’s one of the games which came out in Nürnberg and what I heard was that the copy which Queen Games had at the fair was actually a prototype of the coming game.
Why am I interested in this game? Well, Kairo it actually a remake of an Finnish game Tori designed by Kimmo Sorsamo which was published last year in the Nordic Countries.I was pretty heavily involved in the designing process of the game and therefore it’s interesting to see what Queen Games comes up with when they get Kairo published.
Probably there’s not going to be huge changes at least in the core mechanics of the game. The most innovative mechanic in Tori (a game about trading in a market square) is the satisfying customer needs mechanic(which also was the starting point for the game itself). In the game customers are meeples in different colors and colors represent the customer needs in certain type of goods. Players act as entrepreneurs and try to lure customers to their counters (same colors as the one’s of the customers’). Once a customer buys the goods he needs, the meeple chances to another one in different color (staying at a designated place off board) and voilà, the customer thus wants to consume some other type of goods like he would in real life.
Other mechanics of the game are more like in a average euro style board game and obviously the purpose of the game is score more points than fellow players. Tori is more of a gamers game and I presume that Kairo is going to be developed more into a family game. Maybe they come up with a similar approach they’ve used in Fresco where the basic game is quite basic but you get extras with the main game which deepen the gaming experience.
We have to wait and see.