Japanese Game Round-up: Walking Labyrinths, Tiling Capsules, and Fishy Teetotalism

In ダイジョブ迷宮 (Fine Job Labyrinth), players lay out the walls of a dungeon (printed on paper), then take turns placing vertical wooden slabs (representing stone statues) within this dungeon to create a labyrinth. Gems in the dungeon represent touchpoints that you must visit while making your way through the labyrinth to the final gem on the far wall, and to traverse the labyrinth, you must start with at least one finger on the table near the entrance, then trace a continuous path through the corridors, not knocking over any stone statues along the way or else you'll take damage!

転がる芝浜 (The after story of "Shibahama") is based on a human-interest rakugo vignette named "Shibahama". The title "転がる芝浜" (pronounced "Korogaru Shibahama") means "Rolling Shibahama", and the game has area control and resource management mechanisms and uses action dice.

You are an industrious fish merchant in Edo (ancient Tokyo). You used to be a lazy drunkard, but with a support of your wife, you have changed your mind and successfully abstained — but you cannot force your employees to abstain, and sometimes booze is required to keep business relationships. Are you able to manage your business while staying away from temptation?

You roll and place novice-worker dice and senior-worker dice on the game board to obtain fish, but you have to use these fish early because they gradually decay.

The game consists of forty tiles numbered 1-40, with the tiles being grouped in four buckets on their backs: 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, and 31-40. Players draft tiles at the start of the game while seeing only their backs; tiles in the first group have a "capsule opening" on only one edge, while tiles in the second group have a straight or curved tube from one edge to another, and tiles in the fourth group generally have three or four open edges. You can look at the faces of your tiles are you draft them.

The start player in a round plays one tile of their choice, optionally placing one of their wooden cubes on it. Each other player in turn must place one of their tiles in the same group (if possible) face down in front of them, again optionally placing one of their wooden cubes on it. Players then reveal their tiles, then add them to the shared playing area, starting with whoever has the highest-numbered tile. If you placed a cube on your tile, you then place this cube somewhere on your tile in one of the capsules.

When a capsule is closed, akin to a road being closed in Carcassonne, whichever players have the most cubes in it score points equal to the number of energy symbols in that capsule. After all the tiles have been played, whoever has the highest score wins — except that if exactly one player has scored 0 points, then they win instead!