Pics from Tokyo Game Market, December 2016 II

Time for another round-up of photos from the December 11, 2016 Tokyo Game Market, courtesy of Jon Power, who attended the show with a press pass on behalf of BGG.

For those who don't know, Jon has worked with translators to create Japanese-language submission forms for game, designer and publisher listings on BGG to encourage more participation by JP designers and publishers on this site, and I greatly appreciate those efforts. I know that I couldn't do much of anything on a Japanese game site, so it's been great to see his efforts since mid-2015 bring about more game listings and activities. In some ways, this effort reminds me of when I first immersed myself in hobby games in the early 2000s, with user translations needed in order to play the German games I was ordering (blindly in many cases) from Adam Spielt and other online retailers. Exploring this new (to me) world is exciting, partly because I have no idea what to expect and mostly because I love the exploration process itself. So much to discover!

FLIPFLOPs publishes the wildly successful Heart of Crown deck-building game series, which debuted in Japan in 2011 and which will see the base game released in English in early 2017 from Japanime Games. At TGM in December 2016, FLIPFLOPs was showing off a new battle-type TCG titled Legions! (the logo of which I keep reading as "Legtons!"), with visitors able to get a deck sheet and a quick start guide, with the sheet needing to be cut and sleeved in order to try out the game.

Sunset Games had both original titles and imports from U.S. publishers such as Columbia Games and...Out of the Box Publishing? Must be old stock given that OotB is no longer in business. My knowledge of wargames is minimal, much less my knowledge of Japanese wargames, so I don't have much to offer here.

Gamifi Japan started in 2013 and has more than two dozen games in its catalog, but it has a BGG listing only because I just threw up a page for The Queen and Shoe Makers. Progress?

The relationship between Group SNE and cosaic is unclear to me, but they're almost always listed together on the Game Market website and their logos often appear together on games, whether for original titles or games originally published in Germany or elsewhere. So many mysteries in this market...

From left to right, booths for トイドロップ (Toy Drop), 温泉駅伝/水滸伝マラソン=ブダ・カフェ=, and Saashi & Saashi. Note that these are double-wide booths (e.g., C05-06), and a single booth would be half the length of one of these tables.

An assortment of role-playing games, with some of the Cthluhu-based games having a far different look than those in the U.S. Note also that many of these RPG books are cheap, with ¥500 equalling US$4.25.

Board Game Publisher: 大気圏内ゲームズ (Taikikennai Games)

The Taikikennai Games booth demonstrates one of the problems of TGM that will be familiar to any convention goer. Those six games on display would cost ¥10,500 to purchase, or about US$90. Even if the total were $10, though, you multiply that by 550 exhibitors and you're looking at five grand to pick up everything on display, never mind actually having time to play everything.

You're in the midst of a swirling whirlwind of more potential good things than you can possibly imagine, and at a certain point your mind starts to shut down. You can't even begin to contemplate what the actual size of the Japanese gaming market is, let alone the worldwide gaming market. Hundreds of thousands of colorful boxes end up in new hands each year, and at a certain point you just sit back and think, man, I hope everyone's having fun out there.

Pics from Tokyo Game Market, December 2016 II

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