Tonga Bonga Board Game Review

Year Published: 1998

Players: 3-4

Playing Time: 45-60 minutes

Some designers “get” you better than others. Stefan Dorra, the designer of Tonga Bonga and best known for his family game For Sale, gets me. There’s a particular bite to many of his games that hits differently and just a little bit better than others.

The phrase that pops into my head for many of his best games is “player-driven.” The players are given the keys to do a lot: work together in largely mutually beneficial actions? Stab each other in the back relentlessly? Speed up or slow down the game’s pacing via mechanical decisions? Silently (or explicitly) collude to avoid a runaway leader? Press your luck in ways that count on a particular response from the table to justify your actions?

All of this and more is possible. The best sessions of these games feel like extensions of the personalities at the table and the emergent ways they interact with one another.

Even the more streamlined and accessible games among his output, such as the aforementioned For Sale, feature a fair amount of psychological gameplay to accompany the mechanical decisions you’ll be making.

I have other favorite designers, some I’d likely slot alongside or even slightly above Dorra, though some of this is due to the sheer volume of their output. There are more total hits for me in the output of a few designers, but the ratio of Great-to-Other-Stuff often isn’t as good.

Tonga Bonga was largely forgotten until it was resurrected recently by publisher Playte. They made some updates to the gameplay that we’ll discuss, but left the core of the thing intact. And that’s a good thing. It’s not my favorite Dorra-designed game, but it’s not too far off from those heights either.

Tonga Bonga – Gameplay

You’re sailing around some as-yet unsettled islands and setting up camps for yourself there. I think we’re merchants of some sort, mixed with a bit of piracy. The theme is nautical, but the specifics don’t really matter.

This is a race at its heart. But not one in which you win by being the fastest. Speed helps, but it isn’t everything. Visiting four islands, then returning to the titular starting island, ends the game. But the person who induces this ending isn’t necessarily the winner.

Money is victory points, and money is gathered by visiting islands. It’s also gathered by sending your dice (i.e. workers) to work on others’ ships. And herein lies the heart of the game.

You will offer wages for others’ dice (you have to offer at least a nominal amount), and higher wages will generally attract higher-numbered dice, which in turn equals more speed as you maneuver around the board. But you’re paying for that speed in the form of those wages. Are you paying too much? That depends.

It depends on where you go, and in what order. And who else is vying for the same islands as you (getting there sooner is better).

It also depends on the wages others are setting. The same dice and wages in two separate games could produce two wildly different outcomes, because both exist within the context of what other players are doing, their own incentives and willingness to pay extra to vie for extra speed.

You can also spend a small amount to reroll your dice, should they fail to impress you, and can spend increasing amounts to do so again and again. This isn’t generally advisable, but can be excellent in a pinch.

So that dynamic, collecting and paying and racing toward islands and various ancillary bonuses, makes up the whole of the thing, in a cyclical round structure that repeats itself until the game ends. The game purports to take 45 minutes, and while I’ve found this to be on the low end of what you can expect, 60-75 minutes is reasonable, even including teaching to new players. For  a light- or midweight strategy game with lots of interaction, it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Player-Driven vs. Game-Driven Variance

You’ll probably already suspect some of the points of interaction and how this relates to that “player-driven” descriptor I used in the intro to describe a lot of the designer’s games. You’re probably not expecting just how profound these swings can be, though.

Want to hear something crazy? I’ve seen people re-roll their dice to get lower values on them more often than to try for higher values.

Why? Slowing one or more specific players down at crucial moments can be more important than getting higher wages (or any wages at all!). This is one of the small additions to the most recent addition, and it’s a diabolical one.

The assumption when you first start is the opposite. Compete with others for the juiciest payouts from other ships. So you want high-numbered dice, right? Well, then you might fight over a large payout and accidentally give a player 15 spaces of movement. Then they tread over one of the game’s bonus-movement spaces and this goes up to 18. Suddenly they’re sprinting across the entirety of the board in a single round, all because you wanted a few more dollars!

But then if you roll high numbers, you’re paying with your own victory points (money) to re-roll. When is this worth it? This tension is delicious when it occurs, which it will in most sessions.

The opposite of this is that while dice variance doesn’t feel like it robs players of meaningful agency over their fates, it’s true that you can get extremely unlucky on individual turns of the game. Ideally, the rest of the players will save their ire for other opponents following this – this sort of self-balancing is necessary to ensure no one runs away with the win – but it can sting in the moment.

To me, the dice variance is necessary to create the imbalances that players must then react to. The same is true of the game’s bonus tiles, which weren’t in the original game. These are technically optional, but they provide another source of potential imbalance (the good kind) that creates varied and branching incentive structures for players, and can meaningfully differentiate their strategies as they spatially navigate the board. Otherwise it would be too calculable an experience, and not one in which petty, good-natured rivalries can occur because of various decisions.

Tonga Bonga – Conclusions

The game’s round structure could feel a bit repetitive to some after multiple plays, and turn order matters enough that it can be another source of mild frustration when you don’t get an equal number of rounds in each turn slot. Again, though, if you see this coming and it will hurt you, it’s on you to make sure the table knows it and reacts accordingly to ensure it doesn’t overly help someone else.

That sort of implied space for scheming in the game is not to everyone’s liking. It is to mine, though, and is what completes this as an interesting experience for me. If your group only relates to games mechanically and won’t be willing to engage in some of this lightly collusive behavior, it may fall flat for one of several reasons.

Being able to engage with these elements within the game’s Magic Circle, though, is a type of unique joy gaming can bring, where there’s no true animosity, just a communal striving and pursuit of fun-via-competition.

The game that comes to mind most when I play this is another Dorra game, and it’s also my favorite by him: Marracash. Sadly, it’s long out of print as I write this, but there are rumors of a revival from the same publisher that just released Tonga Bonga. Fingers crossed.

Both allow players to tie their own noose, so to speak, and to form mutual – if tenuous – relationships with other players to further your goals. Indeed, the gameplay necessitates some of this, an “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” that is destined to fall apart at some point but is useful while it lasts.

Lastly, I could have done with a new theme; the naming conventions of islands aren’t overtly problematic, but they seem vaguely reductionist to my eye in a cultural sense. In a bright new package from Playte and with some sensible updates to mechanics and production quality, it’s hard to dwell on this overmuch, but it is one of the few changes I think the game could use. Overall though, few notes, and lots of fun. I look forward to seeing what else the publisher unearths in months and years to come.