Tokkuri Taking

Tokkuri Taking is published by BrainBrain Games and Bright Eye Games. The box shows Rei Betsuyaku's cartoon dinosaurs on the front and bears a blurb on the back postulating the theory that it was the dinosaurs' love of saké (Japanese rice wine) that caused their extinction. You might therefore buy this game with the reasonable expectation that it's a game themed around dinosaurs. If so, you may be disappointed: other than on the box, dinosaurs don't feature at any other point in this game. Tokkuri Taking is actually themed around saké. The tokkuri is a traditional saké drinking vessel and this card game by Takashi Saito is all about emptying as many tokkuri as you can while avoiding ending the game with any vessels that still contain leftover saké.

The game is played with a deck of 32 cards. These all show a tokkuri on one side. 28 of the cards have numbers on the back, three show a 'dummy tokkuri' and one shows a 'troublemaker' tokkuri. The 2-4 players each start off with a hand of seven cards and they have 10 tokens used for scoring. In addition there's a supply of wooden sticks that players use to mark the level of saké in their tokkuri jars.

On your turn you either play a card in front of you as a tokkuri or you play a card for the number side. When you place out a tokkuri, you put a stick on it at level 10. That level is reduced by the effect of number cards and when it reaches zero, you add it to your score pile unless it happens to be a dummy. At the end of a round you score a point for each emptied tokkuri but you lose two points for each tokkuri that still has three or more saké in it. Each player tots up their individual score and the player with the highest score receives tokens from the other players equal to the difference between their scores. Rinse and repeat, and the game ends when any player's tokens are reduced to zero.

Some of the number cards show a single number and some show two or more numbers. To play a card for its number, however, you must be able to enact its effects exactly. If you have just one tokkuri in front of you and it's at level 4, you cannot play a card with the number 5 to affect it because that would reduce it below zero. If a card has two or more numbers, they have to all be applied and they must be applied to different tokkuri. That means that on most turns you'll be reducing the saké levels on opponents' tokkuri as well as your own. In the main, you'll be helping an opponent by reducing their saké levels and bringing them closer to zero, where their owner scores them, but if your opponent only has cards with large numbers then reducing that player's saké levels could be a serious hinderance to them.

Tokkuri Taking then is a game where you're second-guessing what cards you think other players have in their hands. There's a strong push-your-luck element, indeed it's mostly a game of luck, but for younger players there's an educational element too in reinforcing basic maths; albeit that it may seem odd and inappropriate to play with young children a game themed around consuming intoxicating liquor. If only this game were somehow themed instead around dinosaurs... :-)

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