It’s always fun to see what sorts of games are coming out of other countries. Hobby Japan is back with Strange Slot Simulator, a fast playing game where players attempt to guess the distribution of cards in several different decks. Playte has two laser/Battleship games where players shoot a laser into a blank box and must guess what color and where geometric pices are hidden. Orapa Mine has hidden triangles and rectangles. Orapa Space is a bit harder since it has cool planet-shaped obstacles. Playte is also reprinting North American Railways which is a very streamlined, with no track, train game with 18XX vibes. Finally, we have Whales Entertainment with the beautiful Vines and Flowers: Blooming Harmony which is just a tiny bit like “what if Carcassonne was built upwards and not outwards…” where players are trying to chain vines with the same color flowers. The also have Escape from the Silken Web, a cooperative symbol-matching card game where players are unable to communicate.
Hobby Japan
Strange Slot Simulator by パーティ太郎 (Party Taro)
Strange Slot Simulator has 1 to 5 players looking through a set of decks containing 20 cards each. They are trying to figure out which deck is which by flipping over a few cards at a time and recording the ratio cards in the deck. To set up the game, six decks of cards are set up to match a specific ratio of slot machine symbols – things like cherries, bells, etc… Players then close their eyes and take turns rearranging the decks on the table so that no one starts with any clue of which deck is which. The goal during the game is for players to figure out which deck is which, based on the number of each symbol card in the deck.
Players start with a handy privacy shield that shows the exact ratio of each deck of cards. During the game, players grab a deck of cards and flip them over 3 at a time. They can take whatever notes they want, then reshuffle the cards and flip 3 more. This drawing of 3 cards, writing down whatever you want, shuffling, drawing another 3 cards, etc… continues for about four minutes. I believe players may grab a different set of cards each time.
Some of my information even points to upgrades that players can gain if they come across the correct symbols – mostly things to improve your chances, drawing more cards at a time for example.
After the 4 minutes are up, players try to guess which deck is which based on the distributions they’ve deduced. The whole game is repeated for a total of 4 rounds and the player(s) who identify the most decks correctly win the game. There are four modes of play to make the game easier or harder, depending on what the players are looking for: one can play in easy, expert, cooperative, or solo mode.
Korea Board Games
Jusayo – by Woojin Yang (3-5p)
Literally meaning “Give it to me please”, Jusayo reminds me of playing a meld of Uno and Go Fish. It uses a small deck of cards, 1 to 7 in four colors. The 1’s and 5’s are actually multiple colors. To play, one player begins by playing their highest card matching the color of the card in the middle of the table. If a player puts down a 1 or 5, it doesn’t count as both colors, it only changes the color that now needs to be played.
On a turn, if a player cannot play a card, they are eliminated from the round. The interesting bit comes in by forcing other people to play for you. On their turn, rather than playing a card (whether they can or can’t), the active player may tell one of their opponents to play a card for them instead (Jusayo.) If they can play a valid card, play continues with the next active player.
If the named player does not have a valid card to play, the active player is eliminated for this round. However, if the active player is pretty sure someone cannot legally play a card, they can be called out. If the called-out player can’t play a valid card, the active player wins. If they can play a card, the active player is eliminated from the round. The first player to win two rounds wins the game.
Playte
Orapa Mine by Junghee Choi, Wanjin Gill
Orapa Mine is a bit like Battleship, but if you had to launch your shots from the edge of the board. One player manages a secret board full of colored triangular shapes – white, blue, yellow, and black. The active player announces where they would like to fire a laser. This could come from any edge (some are letters and some are numbers.) The board manager then traces the path of the laser, possibly (probably) bouncing off one or more colored triangles hidden on the board.
The board manager then states where the laser excited the board, as well as its color. The laser changes color depending on which colored triangles it hits.
There is a handy chart to remind everyone which colors combine to make other colors. All players mark on their personal sheets the result of the “laser shot”, trying to piece together where all the pieces on the board are located. The first player (regardless of whose turn it is) that can determine where all the pieces are at wins the game. Look for a US release in October.
Orapa Space by Junghee Choi, Wanjin Gill
Orapa Space is the follow-up to Orapa Mine. It’s still a 2 to 5 player game (possibly there will be
a 2 player edition.) The only difference from Orapa Mine is in the shape of the objects hidden on the board.
Rather than rectangles and triangles, the shapes are now colored circles, representing planets, and making the reflections just a bit more complicated. The game components are slightly upgraded. The planets are now cardboard-ish but also have magnets that stick to an upright board for easier viewing. There’s an “expansion” that adds a small black hole. Look for the game to have a US release sometime next year.
North American Railways by Peer Sylvester
North American Railways may be thought of as a super-light 18xx railway style game for 3 to 5 players. Players are bidding for shares in five different companies. The player with the most shares in each company becomes its controller and is allowed to access other purchase options.
After players have bought shares, the game goes through three phases a round. First, money is paid out directly to companies (companies manage their own stack of cash.)
Second, players, in turn order, are allowed to make a company purchase a city using that company’s money. This will increase the company’s income and/or its value at the end of the game, signified by shields on the city card. The one requirement here is that a player must have at least one share in that company (they don’t need to be the controller.) Finally, the companies will use some of their money to pay out to their shareholders.
The money is divided equally, as much is possible, with money rounded down. (This means payouts can often be $0.) If there’s extra money leftover (that couldn’t be divided) the controller of that company may get a bonus and the rest of the money goes back to the bank. Play continues until there’s only a few shares left, a few cities left, or if there’s a round where none of the companies choose to purchase a city. The winner is the player with the most money. Players take their current cash and then add the value of their shares. Each share pays out based on how many shields appear on the cities the company purchased.
Whales Entertainment
Vines and Flowers: Blooming Harmony by Hanshi Li, Wu Ying
Arising from the senior project of some college students, Vines & Flowers: Blooming Harmony has players attaching flowers and vines to a 3 dimensional flower-covered pergola (a thing on which plants can grow to shade one’s deck.)
The basic game has two actions. Each action can be either choosing a plant tile (a maximum of 3 can be held at a time) or attaching one onto the climbing plant. Tiles are taken from a tableau that shifts after a tile is chosen. The first tile is free, but a player must pay a flower token for each tile they skip. When placing a tile, it is connected to a previously placed tile at a 90 degree angle. So the plant will slowly build up over time.
Connect half a flower to another of the same color to complete a flower and collect petal tokens of the flower’s color. The number of petals gained is based on the number of contiguous flowers of the same color on that particular vine. The goal of the game is to collect these petal tokens. At the end of the game, players count their piles of petals. They count the smallest pile for each player and whoever has the most in their pile wins – i.e. the most tokens of one’s fewest color (which also maps to be the same rule as counting whoever has the most complete sets of one of each colored token…)
A more advanced version of the game adds in hummingbirds. These tiles appear in the tile row and trigger a special action card for everyone when they hit the end. A player can claim one early for a personal bonus instead and the group action is not triggered. Of course, this costs petals, and a hummingbird tile does not have a flower on it.
The advanced version also uses bonus icons on the flower tiles. A bee gives a player an extra action (so, three actions in one round.) Ladybugs give out ladybug tokens which are used as a wildcard petal token at the end of the game. Butterflies give a player a special little, 1-connection flower tile. This can be added to any color flower on the plant to complete it. Finally, a spider lets you grab an extra tile from the market, without paying any petals for it.
A very cool plastic see-through version in prototype form. It’s great in that you can see “deeper” into the plant, especially if it gets rather wide. Unfortunately, the current version is still too fragile for commercial production.
The game ends when the cloth tile bag runs out or the fourth hummingbird tiles appears in the market tile row. As mentioned, the player with the most flower petals in their smallest pile of a single color wins the game. Wildcard ladybugs count as a single petal of a color of your choice. The game is not yet out and a crowdfunding campaign will appear soon.
Escape from the Silken Web by Roberto Alhambra, Hanshi Li
Escape from the Silken Web is a cooperative dungeon crawl game taken from one of the chapters in the classic Chinese novel, Journey to the West. Players take a role, with a personal deck and a unique special action, and cooperate through seven levels (rows) of enemies of increasing difficulty. Players, without any discussion, must eliminate the row of threats by matching the symbols of cards in the row.
If a player does not have a match for the next symbol in the row, and can’t or doesn’t want to use their special ability, they can take a rest action. This has no penalty, but if everyone rests in a round the players lose the game. Note, that doesn’t mean no one was able to play, it means no one chose to play. You might want to save a card for later, so you rest, but that is taking a gamble that at least one player after you is able to play. Taking a rest also flips all of a player’s cards. Cards have a top half and a different bottom half so sometimes players will rest just to change the symbols of the cards in their hands.
There are relics that get dealt into the enemy decks. By matching symbols, a player can put the artifact card into their personal deck. These are powerful cards that can help things in a pinch. When used, they are returned back to the enemy pile to appear again. The score for the game is based on a win + any unused artifacts in the player’s decks. Thus, if playing for a high score, players may want to save up their artifacts. However, they then clog up one’s hand, and aren’t in the enemy deck. This makes the enemy deck harder to beat, since there are fewer artifact cards to draw, which otherwise would be replacing an enemy. The game handles 2 to 5 players. Since lower player counts are more difficult, they get a few “extra lives” in order to make it through the entire game. Look for it sometime in September.
