Ever since I stumbled upon the card game Parade at a convention years ago I have been drawn to simple card games with odd deck structures and hidden depths. While in the U.S we seem to be having an arms race of ever increasing size and complexity of components and the promise of infinite replay value in content , in Japan there is a different revolution occurring. The question Japanese card games repeatedly ask is what is the most you can do with a simple deck of cards. This makes sense since games need to
A small note here. The copies are available through a site called Buyee which I hadn’t heard of before. The gist as I understand it is that they buy a game for you locally in Japan and then warehouse it. I had misunderstood and thought that the initial cost I paid was for the game and shipping. Checking some days later when no shipping notification had come there was a note on the site that I needed to pay for shipping and that they would only hold it in the warehouse for X days longer. So I paid a shipping
So on to the game itself. This game has been described with two very different themes. One in which you are in academic research and publishing and peer reviewing papers. And another, which is what is described in the translated rule book where you are publishing and reading novels which eventually become a “Masterpiece” once they are read enough times. The latter theme makes more sense in my mind given works of fiction “pastiche” each other all the time (just watch any season of Stranger Things for example