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Signs inside Big Sight for TGM, with gamers queueing on the ground long before it opens
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Well, first things first, I stopped by the Pen and Dice to drop off 1,800 dice to designer Roy Nambu for use in his Yin-yang Dice. My suitcase was empty on the way to Tokyo and someone who knew I was headed to Tokyo asked a favor for Roy due to the high cost of shipping to Japan, so I ordered and loaded twenty pounds of dice in my suitcase. As a result, the first sale at TGM was likely me getting reimbursed for these dice!
After that, I stashed my suitcase at the Taiwan Boardgame Design stand (thanks again, Smoox!), then started filming. Many of the tables were still empty in the morning as set-up for these stands takes far less time than it does in Indy or Essen. In many cases people show up, tape a sign on the table, stack the games on the table, then wait.
The end of the video shows gamers flooding through the doors after the 10:00 opening. Anyone who's waited at Gen Con or Spiel knows what that sensation is like!
•••
I went to Tokyo Game Market for two reasons:
1. I love almost all of the games that I've played from Japan, and even when the games themselves aren't the best, I enjoy the experience of learning and playing them because they feel different from the games that I normally play. Part of that difference comes from the graphic design of the games — the wider variety of settings and artistic styles used in these games — and part of it comes from the designs themselves, with me sometimes not having a clue as to how something will play out after reading the rules. Only the experience of actually playing the thing, and usually playing multiple times, lets me discover what it is. I enjoy the exploration process that new games invite, the process of meeting a game halfway so to speak — something that I've written about previously — so I wanted to see firsthand what was available at TGM and pick up titles that I might otherwise never see.
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This approach has a number of potential roadblocks, with the biggest one being that it runs contrary to the normal practice of these designers. They produce a small print run, sell out, then maybe print more down the road. Because the print runs are small, their margins aren't conducive to wholesale discounts and they don't have much "extra" stock for wholesaling anyway. The language barrier is also an issue since I don't speak Japanese and most of them don't speak English. Ken Shoda was a huge help at TGM, expanding upon the Japanese/English flyer I had created and (with a lot of back-and-forth with me) answering many questions from publishers as to how this set-up might work.
We've made some progress in this outreach to Japanese designers and publishers and will start selling a few titles from Oink Games in the Geek Store in June 2015. Ideally other titles will come in the months ahead, but we'll see. Any Japanese designers or publishers interested in participating in this program can contact me at the email address in the BGG News header.
•••
Game Market lasts only seven hours, and between the time I spent picking up games (more on that later), pitching publishers on the Geek Store, and posing for photos with BGG fans (I'm still embarrassed by such requests but pleased BGG does have a presence in Japan), I managed to take photos of a small sampling of the games being demoed and sold:
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Baaattle Sheep artist Clara Chang and designer Smoox Chen
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Black Sheep and White Sheep on left, Animals Frightening Night! on right
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Castle Crush! and DaDaocheng designer Tsai Huei-Chiang
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Cat Box — TBD had best have 1,000 copies of that player mat at Spiel 2015!
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Dorasure, which had two new expansions released in 2015
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Origin of Failing Water, an odd trick-taking game in a 2014 edition from Game Field
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Kigi being demonstrated on a looped video at the Game Field stand
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Bolt Action, which isn't Japanese but which was being played
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Wow!Werewolf, one of many Werewolf games at the show
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I don't know — sorry!
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A majority game, I believe, with players taking turns drawing a bead & placing it in a tube;
I observed, but didn't ask for rule details as we were waiting for a table to clear
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Fairy Tale and a Japanese-only expansion pack
I'll interrupt for a minute to note that Fairy Tale will always have a soft spot in my heart, not because of the gameplay (which is quite good) but because of how I encountered it. I was a freelance writer in the early 2000s and had sold GAMES Magazine on an article about Spiel, mostly so that I would have an excuse to travel to Essen on a tax-deductible basis in order to discover this show firsthand.
At Spiel 2004, I encountered the Lamont brothers in their first sales effort (for Leapfrog), tried Louis XIV in prototype form, bought far too many used games, and (of course) discovered Yuhodo's Fairy Tale, which was taught to me and three French gamers by a German who would ask clarifying questions of the designer in Japanese while waiting for one of the three French gamers to explain the game to his friends in French. Encountering that language bouillabaisse was enlightening and one of my favorite gaming memories of all time, with people doing what they needed to do in order for everyone to play together at the same table and have fun.
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Yuhodo's Valkyrie Strike, a Japanese-only deck-builder
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Poster showing off the cards in Valkyrie Strike and making me further regret not knowing Japanese
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Guys playing a traditional card game who cheered and posed when they saw the BGG jersey
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Blowin' in the Wind — that's all I know about this one
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Designer Chen Po-Chiao demonstrating Wok on Fire!, with players flipping ingredient cards w/ their spatula
I wish that I had taken way more pictures than I did, but I got busy with other things, alas. I wish for a lot of things.
•••
Aside from everything else mentioned above, I managed to play a few games, too. Unglaublich! I already covered Mangrove in my first TGM report, but I also played the Saien title Neos, a hand management game in which you try to create lines and match colors across your played cards in order to score points.
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We also ran through a round of Zittia, an older Saien release not in the BGG database yet that I described previously as looking like "a pile of trash". In the game, you either take an item from the pile and place it somewhere on the "bidding bag" (thereby passing the turn to the next player) or you challenge the person before you to handle everything that they've passed to you.
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In more detail, when you place an item on the bag, you're indicating specifically how this item must be handled: the gray foam cylinder must be placed between the index and middle fingers, the plastic lips must be placed on your thumb, the hamburger must be balanced on the back of your hand, the plastic pig must be balanced on that hamburger, and so on. The trick is that not only must you put all of this stuff on, in, through and around your hand, but you must pick up a thick wooden dowel while doing so and stand that dowel on end.
Once you think that the task can't be done, you don't add another item to the pile, but challenge the previous player. Everyone else then bets on whether the player can complete the challenge or not, then players score based on the outcome.
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Hiroaki Nakanishi from Saien on the verge of failure
One interesting aspect to this design is that it grew out of the ¥500 challenge presented to Japanese designers in (I believe) 2012. Saien was wondering what it could produce for ¥500 (approx. US$5), and it hit upon using detritus from previous game productions and whatever they could find that would fit within the price limit. As Mark Rosewater is fond of saying, "Restrictions breed creativity."
We also played the Saien game Hau La, which Japon Brand brought to Spiel in 2010. In this game, each player has a bunch of foam pieces of different lengths with holes in them, and you take turns adding one piece to the central structure each round, then placing your personal marker on that piece, trying to be higher up in the structure than others so that you can take the one bonus piece each round and add that.
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While the piece you place can't touch other pieces in order for the move to be valid, nothing stops you from twisting the structure around and distorting what others have done on previous turns. Thought you were on top? Yoink! Now your piece is scraping on the underside of other ones, a lowly remora that can barely see my porpoise leaping high in the air.
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Blue edges out orange for the win
One non-Saien game we played was Board Liner, the name of which I know only because I remembered to include part of the rulesheet in the image that I took. Sometimes I'm clever. In this two- and three-player game, each player gets multiple sets of tokens and you take turns placing them on the board, trying to block others from placing so that they'll be forced to introduce one of their other sets of tokens or the neutral set placed on the side at the start of the game. If you can't place a piece on your turn, you're out; whoever places last in the game wins.
One key placement rule: You can never occupy the fourth space in a 2x2 square. It was a clever and simple abstract strategy game that reminded me of others, although I'm blanking on exactly which games right now. One of the hazards of becoming older...
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•••
Okay, I had intended to wrap up everything in this second report, but I kept adding picture after picture and realizing that I should split my day after TGM into a separate post. Look for part three to come in less time than the distance between parts one and two. I swear! To close for now, here's a pic of what I brought home from the May 2015 Tokyo Game Market:
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I now have a few (more) things to play...
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