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The funny thing is that when you watch the videos themselves, you'll notice only two or three speakers in front of the BGG backdrop as usual. Video magic! Let me thank Ken Shoda, on the left in the image above, for being incredibly helpful as always, both due to his translation on camera and off and to him knowing dozens of people at Game Market and connecting us with many folks along the way. We have more than enough people scheduled to fill our second day at the show, and I wish that we had more time at TGM, but alas, we don't.
The event differs a bit from earlier shows I've attended in that the con has a concentration of larger booths in one area, with those exhibitors staying in place for both days of the show. Some of the smaller individual "doujin" publishers who take the meter-wide or double-meter-wide tables will appear at TGM on Sunday as well as Saturday, often with a different booth number, but more than a hundred exhibitors will be new for this second day, giving you a reason to go back because you could not have seen them on Saturday even if you wanted to. The two-day show is an interesting way for Game Market to expand, while still staying the same size.
One of those larger booths is from BakaFire Party, which debuted a new expansion for BakaFire's Sakura Arms, which is hugely popular here among some players. The booth had music playing, the artist TOKIAME signing posters and drawing images, demo tables on the side, a large space on the other side of this booth for a tournament area, and a line of interested buyers that wrapped around the entire structure.
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It's amazing to see this much activity for a game that in the U.S. has generated (from my perspective) little excitement or talk, but as a couple of U.S. publishers have pointed out to me, what generates a buzz among U.S. gamers tends to differ a lot from what gets JP gamers excited. The line for Sakura Arms might have been beaten by the one for Blade Rondo from Domina Games, a title that I hadn't even heard of prior to showing up here. Domina has released several games with both JP and EN rules in the past, but this title had a lot of text, so English rules don't exist right now, so it might be tough to find out more right now until JP fans start talking about the game — assuming it has fans in the long run. It's hard to know what will happen following TGM because often you get only a taste of something, and FOMO makes you say, what the heck, I'll buy it because after the con ends, you're possibly out of luck.
HIKTORUNE from Takizawa Masakazu of こぐま工房 (Koguma Koubou) has also created a buzz, and we recorded an overview of the game so that you can see it in action later.
The gist of this cooperative game is to collect items and complete quests so that you can defeat a dragon before you run out of lives, but its hook is how you acquire cards. To begin the game, you stand the cards on edge on a piece of felt, with the cards spread out so that they're supported vertically against one another in a leaning pyramid of sorts or something that looks like a suspension bridge. On a turn, you can grab as many cards as you like, whether from either end or from somewhere in the middle, but the card stack can't fall over or else you lose a life (after which you shuffle discarded cards with the deck to form a new "deck").
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If you don't lose a life, you then use those cards to complete quests, connecting elements with a guardian that can use them and having other special items as well. As you complete quests, you gain rewards fur use in future levels. You can keep only a limited number of elements each turn, so grabbing too many cards might hurt more than help if you have to just throw them away.
I can see this card-grabbing system being adopted for many other game designs because it creates a lot of excitement during play.
Okay, time to prep for another trip to Tokyo Big Sight and another full day of booth-hopping in which your eyes are always bigger than your wallet...
Coffee House from analog lunchbox was another buzz-getter, a very Euro-sounding game from Masaki Suga, seen in the center above
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