Tokyo Game Market took place this past weekend, Oct. 29-30, which is weeks earlier than is normal, and I watched dozens of appealing titles appear on Twitter as designers and publishers advertised their creations and people posted pics of their game hauls.
Here is a sliver of what was available at that show:
• Designer Fuzz (ファズ) of Ferret Games Factory (フェレットゲームズファクトリー) had two new titles at TGM, with dice_market being a spinoff of 2020’s dice_mancala. Here’s how the designer describes this 1-4 player game: “Quickly change your infinite number of dice to meet the demands of the market and exchange them for finite agricultural products. The more produce you bring back, the richer your life will become.”
ジューシーキッチン (Juicy Kitchen) is a more involved strategy game, with 2-4 players trying to make more juice sales than anyone else in order to impress the owner of this establishment.
• ピンコンビトリオ (Pin Combi Trio) is a card game for 2-5 players from Taiki Shinzawa and 小学館 (Shogakukan) in which you want to empty your hand first.
The lead person in a round plays either a single card (pin), two consecutive cards (combi), or three cards that differ by the same amount, e.g., 2-4-6 or 1-11-21 (trio), then subsequent players must play the same number of cards but higher.
• ならべてカンブリア (Line Up Cambria) is a minimalist card game for 2-4 players from designer 千夜一葉 (Kazuha Chiya) and publisher 植民地戦争+α (Colonial War+α) that plays as follows:
In ならべてカンブリア, you build a miniature version of the Cambrian sea out of eight cards, trying to score as many points as possible. To set up, shuffle the landscape cards and scoring cards face down, then lay them out in four piles. Choose a first player.
In a round, starting with the first player, each player chooses a pile of cards not in front of themselves, selects a card from it, then adds it to the left or right of all cards they already have in play. Landscape cards are placed horizontally and have two elements on them; scoring cards have one element on them and one of three types of scoring conditions, and they are placed a line vertically (so the scoring condition is present below their line of cards).
Pass the starting marker, then start a new round. After eight rounds, tally your points based on the scoring cards you’ve collected and how well you’ve met those conditions. The player with the highest score wins.
• RoRop is an abstract strategy game for 2-4 players from Fulelu Edutainment Games. Here’s how it works:
On a turn, a player chooses a color present on the bottom row of the game board, then takes one or more blocks of this color from the bottom of the board. Keep taking turns until all of the blocks have been claimed, then tally your score.
In the basic game, your score is the number of blocks you claimed. In the intermediate game add to this number the product of the number of different colors you claimed and the number of blocks in your most prevalent color. In the expert game, score the product of the number of different colors you claimed and the number of blocks in your first claimed color, then add the number of blocks you collected.
You can also use the RoRop components to play a four-in-a-row game. Starting with the empty game board, on a turn either (a) add a block to the top of any column or (b) remove a block from the bottom of any column, then place it on the top of any column. If a player takes the (b) action, the next player must take an (a) action, if possible. If you create a line of four blocks of the same color, whether orthogonally or diagonally, you win.
