Japanese Game Round-up: Create Lenses, Write Poetry, and Use Four Pairs of Cards

In the card game Dupli, each player starts with the nine cards in hand. On a turn, you each choose and reveal two cards, then carry out the effects of those cards, which have a rock/paper/scissors style of ranking, along with potential reversals of powers. More than one person can win a round, and the winners split the cards played, with the remainder carrying over to the next round.

After four rounds, whoever has won the most cards wins.


You can play Dupli with fixed hands of nine cards so that everyone has the same options available or by adjusting the card count in the deck based on the number of players, then shuffling and dealing nine cards to each player.

HYKE is a poetic communication game in which you create senryū — poems with a 5-7-5 syllable structure, typically about human foibles — in which someone at the table can identify the theme of your creation, but ideally not too easily.


To set up, players submit themes to a central pool, then you draw one of those themes at random, create a senryū based on that theme, and invite others to identify the theme of your creation. Your score is the number of people who guess incorrectly before someone guesses correctly, so you want your poem to be both not too easy to understand and not too difficult to understand.