Tokkuri Taking

Tokkuri Taking is a marginally insane card game about dinosaurs drinking sake.

If that elevator pitch doesn’t sell it, then perhaps the quirky nature of play will. Each player begins with ten tokens (points) and everyone is dealt seven cards. On your turn, you must play a card: you can play face-down as a tokkuri, full of sake, and place a blue marker on it to show your tokkuri is full at value ten.

Or you can play a card face-up and drink sake instead. To do this you must be able to either drink the entire number value (for example, seven) from a single tokkuri (in your example, a tokkuri that has seven or more sake still in it). If the card has multiple numbers, you must drink from multiple tokkuri, and each of them only once. It doesn’t matter whose tokkuri you drink from, only that it must contain enough sake to satisfy the values on your card: you can’t play a five value card and drink from a 4 value tokkuri, for example.

The goal is to try and bring at least one tokkuri to exactly zero: do that, and you claim the tokkuri card as a point. At the end of the round – when all players run out of cards – you’ll gain a token for each tokkuri you claimed, but must pay two tokens for any tokkuri in front of you with 3 or more sake in. Then each player who won less tokkuri than the round winner must pay them the difference in tokens – let’s say you won four tokkuri and I only won one: I pay you three tokens.

Some cards have special effects on them that activate either when played to drink or claimed as a tokkuri. The game continues until one player runs out of tokens, at which point the player with the most tokens wins!