Designer: Sengoku Ichiro (千石 一郎)
Publisher: 数寄ゲームズ (Suki Games)
Players: 3
Playing Time: 20-30 minutes
Times Played: 3 on purchased physical copies; a few more times with a Google Sheets mock-up


I’m going to talk below about the many ways I love Encyclopaedist and its tragic flaws, of which there are many. Some of them are in the game’s conceit: it is three-player only; some of them are in the components: you’ll exhaust the provided post-it notes after only a few games; some of them are in the game’s potential as a commercial product: you can mock it up with three pieces of string and a pad of post-it notes; some of them are in the mechanics, ….well, we’ll get into those.

But I love the game.

In short, each player will have a category (such as “things that can be sharp” or “one syllable words”), and, variously, the players will attempt to guess words in the different intersectives of the venn diagram created by three brightly colored ropes.

Designer: Muneyuki Yokouchi (横内宗幸)
Publisher: 操られ人形館 (Ayatsurare Ningyoukan)
Players: 3-4
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Times Played: 8 (some on a friend’s copy, some on a copy I purchased (1st ed.), some on a second copy I purchased (3rd ed.))

I first played Age of Assassins in 2014.  I didn’t own a copy at the time, and while there were rumors it was licensed, at some point I stopped holding my breath for that imminent announcement.  I loved it then, (and I hope that isn’t Spoiler City for our destination.)  In the intervening years, as my knowledge of how to acquire small print run games from Japan has increased, I eventually bought a copy, and, well, now have 2. 

It is a drafting game with sequential resolution.

Let’s break that down.