As a quick recap, this is the story about a socially awkward girl who feels like she’s different than everyone else and can’t have fun, but then she meets a new student at her school who pulls her into adventures which ends up with them finding their student council president working at a board game store and they start to learn about board games.

In episode #2, they are back in school and excited to try out a new game that their student council president has brought with her. But they notice that another student is staring at them. So Aya, the new student, invites him to join in playing the game of Cockroach Poker. She doesn’t realize that he’s interested in her and that’s why he was watching them, and she’s not that great at bluffing, which is needed for cockroach poker. Then, in the end, Aya reads it all wrong and thinks that he’s interested in Midori, the student council president, which confuses him even more.

Let’s talk a bit about the episode before I talk more about the game and some thoughts on that. I think that the anime still hasn’t hit it’s pace. It’s very much a slice of life anime, but it’s kind of a background slice of anime. It isn’t one that leans too heavily into the humor that you can get from a lot of slice of life anime, so you don’t have to fully follow to catch all of the jokes. This is definitely a weakness of the anime, because you can miss some of what is going on in the show, because it isn’t attention grabbing enough.

On the other hand, I think that it is doing a good job of showing off what I love about board games. It branches out and brings people who might not be together into a single group. To me, that’s one of the things that I love about board games. And I think it does a good job of showing how board games can help you process with real life things or, in the case of this episode, how real life things can influence how you play a board game, because the guy was trying really hard not to beat Aya or cause her to lose anyways, and how playing with someone you like can affect how you play a game.

Let’s talk some about Cockroach Poker. It’s a gross sounding game, and you have bugs that you are playing and lying about. Or you might be trying to tell the truth. But on a person’s turn, they are playing a bug card face down and then telling another player that it is either the bug that it is, or lying about it and saying it’s another bug. The person then either guesses that you are lying or not, or if they don’t know, they pass, look at the card and then present it to another player, either saying the same bug or a different one. But if you are caught lying or called out for telling the truth, you get the card in front of you, but if you are telling the truth and the person thought you were lying or vice-a-versa, they get the card. You are trying to not be the first person to get four of a single bug, or one of all eight bugs. This game actually seems pretty interesting to me in terms of a bluffing game. It’s a simple enough one and easy to teach. That said, I feel like bluffing games have a limited appeal, because while most people can understand the concept of bluffing, if you aren’t good at bluffing, it makes a game like this harder to play. I’m okay at bluffing, generally better after two drinks, but I don’t think this game would be everyone’s cup of tea.

Overall, I’m still thinking this anime has more that it can offer. I do really enjoy that it’s teaching about board games and bringing them into the public eye more. Now, it is anime, so it is fairly niche, but overall, I’m sure that it’ll introduce more people to the variety of games that are out there and they have done a good job of having simple but different games than people would know. I’m hoping that it can build into more of an anime with a bit of a story instead of being so separate, I know that’s not what all slice of life anime does, but I think this would benefit from it, because it isn’t quite funny enough just to have completely stand alone episodes.

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Episode 1: A New World

We start out this anime, in a pretty common way, especially for a school anime. The main character, Miki, is a quiet and shy character who just does her own thing and really doesn’t know how to have fun. That changes when a fellow classmate, Aka, accidentally runs her bike into a river/stream and decides to teach Miki about having fun. Together, they decide to follow their class representative into the “entertainment” district, because that’s expressly forbidden for the students to be there after 6, and it’s night. There they find out that she works at a game shop and the shop owner decides that the girls should learn how to play some board games.

Thus far the anime hasn’t done anything that really stands out, except for the fact that there are board games in there. And not that there are games like Monopoly, Scrabble, Uno, Skip-Bo, etc in the anime and in the game store, there are games like Ice Cool, Marrakech (more to come on that), and so many more in the store. Even the ones that only had the title in Japanese on the game, I could recognize a lot of them. There has clearly been a lot of effort making it seem like an actual board game store and keeping the stock of the store in a modern setting. It isn’t that uncommon to see a random copy of Monopoly or something like that in a show, but for an anime to create a store with that much detail it’s impressive.

That said about the anime, while it might not have set itself apart from some other slice of life animes, it hasn’t been week in telling it’s story. The characters, while tropes, are pretty well done, and the shop keeper of the board game store is amazing. He reminds me of Jet Black from Cowboy Bebop, though, I have to thank Kristen for putting that into my head, but it works wonderfully. And I think that there is going to be room for the anime to grow. It kind of feels like they are using board games to help get their little messages or little bits of character development across, and that’ll be interesting to see how they can tie it all together.

One thing I want to do in these reviews is talk about the games that they are playing in a given episode. In the first episode the game was Marrakech. In the game everyone is a rug salesman trying to get as much money as possible. To do this, you are moving around a character Assam across the board. Depending on where he ends, you have to pay other players for their rugs, if you land on one of theirs, counting the connected pieces. Then you place one of your rugs down, but you can’t fully cover up another rug. The game goes until everyone has played all of their rugs, then you get money for how many rugs of your color are showing, plus whatever you had from before, and the person with the most money wins. This game, from what they showed in the show, seems like a very interesting abstract puzzle with a fair amount of luck thrown in, because Assam moves as few as one space each round, and as many as four, based off of what you roll on the dice. So you can hopefully plan some, but you won’t be able to fully plan. There seems to be good depth to the game, though, as you try and force your opponents or at least increase the likelihood to land on your rugs so that they have to give you money. The game seems like it would play quite quickly as well, which is fun. Overall, this is a game that I would like to try before I’d add it to a collection, but I can see it being a game that would have a lot of cheering moments as you get the roll that you or the opposite on a low roll.

I’m excited to watch the next episode and see where the show goes. I love to see board games show up in more popular culture. Already this year we had Nemesis from Awaken Realms show up on an episode of South Park, and now we have an anime that is completely about board games. If you enjoy board games, and after one episode, check out this anime. It’s streaming through Funimation, and they are dubbing it, so I’ve only watched the dubbed version, which was good.

Let me know your thoughts on this anime. Is there another show that you’ve found about board games out there? Would you want to or have you played Marrakech?

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