Tokkuri Taking Review

I get the same excitement when I see an unknown, small, east Asian game that I used to get from obscure import video games. I saw plenty of them at last week’s UK Games Expo (report here), but instead of getting Super Long Nose Goblin (Hanatakadaka) for the PC Engine, I came away with two recently signed by Bright Eye Games – Sumo and Tokkuri Taking. Both are a lot of fun, but I’m talking about the latter here.

And yes, I really had Super Long Nose Goblin. It was okay.

Kanpai!

The story of the game is an unusual one. You’re dinosaurs drinking sake at a party, and the aim of the game is to collect the most empty tokkuri, which are the traditional sake jars. Now that you know that, you can basically ignore it. It’s cute, but the game is entirely abstract and it could have been literally any theme on the box.

That said, I bloody love dinosaurs, so I was already biased towards this one before I even bought it. And not just because Mark from their stand plied me with sake.

Each player has a hand of cards. On the back is a picture of a tokkuri with 10 rows on it. On your turn you either play a card face-down, adding another tokkuri to the party (it’s gonna get wild), or face-up to use the values printed on the card to drink sake from the tokkuri on the table. If you manage to empty a tokkuri exactly with your card, you collect it and it counts as a point for you (most of the time at least, I’ll come back to that). There are a couple of twists thrown in though, just to keep things interesting.

Firstly, you can only play a card you can completely satisfy. If your card shows 4 + 4 + 4 it means you need to take 4 from three different tokkuri. Not 4 from two of them and three for another to finish it. If there are fewer than three on the table, you can’t play it as you need to take from three. The other little bit of boozy fun which keeps you on your toes is that you can claim any of the tokkuri on the table, not just your own.

See, you like that, don’t you?

Making bank

Scoring is fun in Tokkuri taking, too. Each player starts with 10 in the bank. Counters, coins, gummy bears – it doesn’t matter what you count with, you have ten of them. When a round ends you get a point per collected tokkuri, and lose two points for every tokkuri with at least 3 sake left in them in front of you. The winner of the round is the player with the highest score, and all other players have to pay them the difference between their scores from their own bank.

Let’s say you and I are playing. I score 3, you score -4. You owe me 7 gummy bears, friend. Short arms and deep pockets won’t cut it here.

When one player’s bank is empty, the game ends and you tally the scores. It’s really as easy as that. I mentioned above that tokkuri are not always worth a point, and that’s because there are a few dummy cards in the game. You can only play them as tokkuri, but they’re worth nothing. It leads to some interesting mind games where you might almost drain that one, tempting someone else into finishing the jar.

It’s a really interactive game when you consider how small a box it comes in. We’re talking half the size of an Oink game. Now that’s small!

Final thoughts

This isn’t a big review because it doesn’t need to be. Tokkuri Taking is a quick, easy card game with a lot of cunning behind it. You get ideas for different strategies very quickly. Chris (designer of Zuuli) and I played a few games one evening at UKGE, and we quickly tried to invent the same strategy more than once. I’ve played it since with four players, and I think I enjoy it more with more players, but it’s still definitely worth playing at two.

It’s obviously not a big, or long game. It’s not like you’re going to go to your group and say “Okay guys, shall we play On Mars or Tokkuri Taking tonight?”, but it’s the perfect filler for the start or end of an evening. It’s also an ideal pub game because it’ll even fit into your skin-tight jeans’ pockets, fashionistas.

The little sticks to track sake levels are charming, and the artwork, although minimal, is still really cute. As and when print runs happen I highly recommend adding Tokkuri Taking to your teeny games collection. Cheap, cheerful, silly, and a lot of fun.

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