Sometimes interesting little games fall into your lap by a round about fashion. A friend picked up two copies of Navia Dratp for a total of five pounds, and gave me one of the copies, primarily because I paint miniatures, and the box comes with 16 miniatures that are a couple of inches high. The miniatures are excellent, made of a slightly bendy plastic and are full of detail. Most of them are grey, but the two main pieces, the Navia, are fully painted. It is a really nice set of miniatures.

The game is difficult to track down and comes in two formats. There is a large boxed set with two factions and a solid board, and smaller boxed sets with only one faction and a roll out mat for a board, as well as ‘booster’ boxes of additional miniatures. The large box effectively gives you everything you need to play, but with the smaller boxes you would need two sets to provide opposing forces.

Navia Dratp is essentially a chess like game with a 7 by 9 grid, where your ‘Navia’ miniatures are your king pieces in the game. It is kind of fused with a collectible miniature game where each of the miniatures has their own particular movement and special moves, plus a bit of resource management. It comes with a handful of coloured gems that you collect during the game and then spend at a later point, in order to upgrade your miniatures to a more powerful form.

The rules are clear and concise, very straightforward, although there is a certain amount of terminology to get used to, like gulled, gyullas and maseitai. At the start of the game you only have your Navia on the board and a set of gulled, which are shield shaped plastic tiles. When you move the gulled you collect gyullas, which are the gems, and collect more gyullas if you manage to ‘take/capture’ an opponent’s gulled.

Once you have collected enough gyullas to ‘buy/deploy’ a maseitai, one of the grey miniatures, you place it on the board on one of the summoning squares marked on the board. Once they are in play you can move a maseitai instead of a gulled or the Navia, and use it to capture opposing gulled or maseitai. The objective of the game is to capture the opposing Navia. The concept of ‘check’ still applies, and also prevents an opponent’s Navia from ‘dratpting’, which is central to the game. 

When you upgrade a maseitai to its higher form it costs gyullas and is called dratpting, it only costs half the normal gyullas on five central squares on the board, which prompts players to move their pieces forward and control the central area of the board. You can also dratp the Navia, which costs a lot of gyullas, but wins you the game, so it is important to bear in mind how much gyullas your opponent has collected, and how much they have the potential to gain.

Although in principle very simple, Navia Dratp can be overwhelming to begin with purely because each maseitai has its own individual movement and ability. Some of them move diagonally, some move orthogonally, some move short or long distances, and others can hop over other miniatures. This really gets the heavy thinking involved, both in judging the value of your own maseitai and bearing in mind what tricks your opponent can pull off with their maseitai.