• Japanese creators continue to make in-roads on Kickstarter to introduce their creations to audiences far outside the limits of Game Market, as with KUJIRADAMA's first crowdfunded project on KS (link) for the 3-6 player game Milhouette from designer Emi Kuji. Here's how it works:

Quote:

• KUJIRADAMA's previous release in 2021 was TrumPen from designer Nagisa Kujira, with this being more of a game system than a single game.

TrumPen consists of a deck of 54 dry-erase cards and six dry-erase marks, and it includes rules for versions of poker, blackjack, trick-taking, and a Dutch Blitz-style speed game. You can find English rules for all of the games here.

In the poker game, for example, each of the 3-6 players writes a hand of five cards, with cards ranging in value from A-9 with six players and with four suits being in play, then you call out card hands from high value to low: straight flush, four-of-a-kind, full house, etc. If no one has created a hand, you move on to the next lower one; if someone has created such a hand, they reveal it. If another player has used one of the revealed cards in their own hand, then the player who revealed their hand is out. Players can eliminate one another if they both have, say, full houses and they each used one or more cards that the other player did. Eventually one player will win the round or everyone will be eliminated.

The better your winning hand, the more points you score, so you're encouraged to take chances, and the game ends when someone has scored 5 points or nine rounds have been completed.

• HIZURU is a game / art project on Kickstarter (link) that started as an event during Game Market Live in July 2021 during which the creators — working under the name "ボードゲームヒーローズ" (Board Game Heroes) — came up with the game idea and started developing it during a 48-hour interactive livestream, with the artists drawing pictures in response.

Draft cover art

The Kickstarter project page is almost entirely in Japanese, and Miss Merc (who writes a lot about JP games) notes that the KS project is also designed to help other creators learn how to run a Kickstarter, which means that the crowdfunding project is evolving along with the game itself. As of this writing, the project has another 28 days to go, so its timeline is longer than most, and ideally more details will come to light — especially since the project has opened a hundred English-language copies of the game. It would be good to know what you're getting unless you like the idea of diving into the unknown to see what ¥4,000 gets you!

• In May 2021, I wrote about すべてがちょっとずつ優しい世界 (A World Where Everything Is a Little Kinder), a press-your-luck card game from designer Taiki Shinzawa and publisher 双子のライオン堂 (Twins Lion Do). Through the end of August 2021, the publisher is Kickstarting a new printing of the game that will include rules in English.