Game Preview: Rolling Japan, or Why a Stupid Green Six Will Make You Curse the Heavens

Game Preview: Rolling Japan, or Why a Stupid Green Six Will Make You Curse the Heavens
Board Game: Rolling Japan
I hosted a gaming meetup group for years in Concord, New Hampshire, and in addition to our regular bunch of gamers, we'd get newcomers from time to time who had practically no experience with modern games. For times like that, I always went to Diamant (because you could learn and get playing in a minute), Bohnanza (because you played somewhat co-op and everyone talked to bring the newbie into the game), or Take it Easy! (because you could eat or drink while playing something low stress).

Peter Burley's Take it Easy! fascinates me because it's truly a new take on the game experience, a modern age Bingo in that it can accommodate any number of players and everyone is competing in only the loosest sense. For all the talk of multiplayer-solitaire games — although that talk has died away somewhat in recent years — none of the games accused of MPS holds a candle to Take it Easy!, which is indeed 100% multiplayer solitaire.

Other designers have tried to release games that fit that same MPS niche — including Burley himself with the sequels Take it to the Limit! and Take it Higher! — and the latest take on the MPS idea is Hisashi Hayashi's Rolling Japan, published through his own OKAZU Brand label. Rolling Japan is a dice game that accommodates any number of players as long as they all have a map to mark off and crumble up in disgust when things don't go their way...

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