In a December 2020 write-up of the Autumn Tokyo Game Market, Takuya Ono of Table Games in the World mentions dozens of titles, a fair number of which had listings in the BGG database, but many of which did not. I’ve now filled in one of those gaps thanks to a publisher’s announcement at Spielwarenmesse 2023 for an upcoming game.
The original game was Esperaization from designer Keisei and publisher treehoppergames, with this title having been released in late 2019, with an expansion — Entropy — in late 2020.
Publisher Hobby Japan has now licensed this design, made modifications to it (e.g., the player count is now 3-5 instead of 2-4), and contracted new art and graphic design from TANSAN. Here’s an overview of the end result, the co-operative word game Gibberers: Invention of Language and Civilization:
Gibberers is an expert word game akin to field linguistics. In the game, players become primitive humans who meet aliens and create a new language that allows them to communicate. As the vocabulary grows and generations pass, the new language evolves like a tech tree.
Image: Leon J. Scheuber
Gibberers includes short rules that allow for a 60-minute game and full “expert” rules that generate a 180-minute experience not like any other word games.
My wife did field linguistics in Bulgaria in college, so I have an inkling of what this game might feel like, while at the same time being baffled as to the overall experience. In any case, it sounds wildly different from most other games on the market!
• Hobby Japan also plans to release a trilogy of titles from designer Susumu Kawasaki, two of them being new editions of previously released games — R-Eco and Master of Rules — and the third — Builder’s High — being new.
R-Eco debuted from the designer’s own Kawasaki Factory in 2003, making this a 20th anniversary edition, and it was part of the 2006 offerings from Japon Brand at SPIEL, an event that brought the design to a wide audience.
In R-Eco, your hand is a dump truck loaded with recyclable material. On a turn, you drop off material at a matching recycling facility (glass, paper, steel, plastic), then pick up unsorted waste from that facility. If you have more than five items in hand, you must dump them illegally, which costs you points. When you make a facility hit its trash quota, you take a scoring token from that facility. At game’s end, you score for a facility only if you have at least two tokens from it.
Japon Brand at SPIEL ’06
It’s a brilliantly simple design that evokes its subject matter, and I’ve played it dozens of times. Recommended! Hobby Japan notes that its edition will feature expansion rules
Master of Rules is for 3-5 players, and each player has a hand that contains number cards and rule cards. In a round, each player in order plays either a number or rule to the table, then they in order play the type of card they didn’t play the first time. You can’t repeat a rule played by another unless you have no other options in hand. If your rule was satisfied by the cards played, then score it.
Rules include “Only One”, which requires your card to be the only one of its number and color; “Trio”, which requires three cards of the same number or color; and “Support Right”, which requires your right-hand neighbor to make their rule in order for you to make yours.
Hobby Japan describes Builder’s High as a hand-management game in which you have budget and building cards in hand, with you combining budget cards to play buildings.
Image: Tak from Japon Brand
