Samurai: The Card Game

Inspired by the game Samurai, here the same designer takes the basic tenets of that game and creates a slighter simpler version that doesn’t require a board.

Like the original, Samurai: The Card Game has the players striving to collect three things: High Hats, Buddhas and Rice Paddies. How they do this is by playing cards: each player starts with a deck of cards in their own colour and deals themselves a hand of five. A village card is placed on the table, which will have at least one (sometimes more) symbol on it showing a triangle, circle or square – these represent High Hats, Buddhas and Rice Paddies mentioned above. The active player begins by placing a card adjacent to the village card. Then they replenish their hand up to five cards and the next player takes a turn.

So gameplay is very simple, but what you’re trying to do with the cards is slightly trickier: as the game continues the playing area grows with more cards being laid. As soon as two different players are adjacent to each other at the edge of a village card (for instance, north and east of a village card), another village card must be placed between them (north of east; east of north). And as soon as a village is surrounded it is scored, and the player with the most of the matching symbols next to it claims the contents of that village for themselves – a high hat, buddha or rice field. So where you play your cards is key, because a circle card next to a village with a triangle in it, for instance, is useless. Mixed in with your squares, circles and triangles however are samurai cards – these are wild and can be played next to anything.

What may at first seem like a simple play a card, move on experience will reveal itself to be a game where canny card play and clever strategy will decide the winner. At the end of the game (when all cards have been placed) the winner will have captured the most of a symbol – but in a tie (which are common) the other symbols you have captured come into play.