Koinobori
- Board's Eye View
- Sep 12
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 26
Koinobori are brightly colour koi carp shaped windsock kites that are traditionally flown in Japan in celebration of Children's Day in May. This game from Devir and Perro Loko, designed by David Bernal, is themed around this annual event. It's a family-friendly card game, with colourful attractive art from Amelia Sales.
The Koinobori cards represent koi carp windsocks of various colours. Seven cards are placed up as the draw row. In addition, there will be a number of Festival Posts from which Koinobori can be hung (one more than the number of players). On your turn, you can either draw a card from the draw row - subject to your maximum hand size limit - or play a card, either to one of the Festival Posts or to what is effectively your personal player board.
Players have an individual set of four cards functioning as a personal player board. On your turn you can only make use of abilities on uncovered cards on the first uncovered card on your board; so initially just the first level, limiting to one the number of cards you can draw and play and limiting your hand size to three. When you play a card (face down) to your personal board, you are predicting which colour of Koinobori will be in the majority at the end of the game in each Festival Post. The game will end when five Koinobori cards have been played to each Festival Post, and players' score will be the number of Koinobori in the winning colour multiplied by the number of those colours on your personal board. Be warned tho', if you predict a colour as a winner that turns out not to achieve a majority in any Festival Post, you'll take penalty points in the final scoring.
Koinobori is easy to play but there's some strategy involved over making the most effective use of your cards to accurately 'predict' the winning colours; after all, cards you place face-down on your personal board obviously aren't contributing to the majorities in a Festival Post. Go early in your predictions and you unlock more powerful actions on your turns but at the expense of it being much more of a gamble over whether or not the colours you choose will score. It's an interesting balance. And this is a memory game too because your drafting is open information so, other than the cards you were initially dealt, your opponents will have knowledge of all the cards available to you...
