Tokkuri Taking

Dinosaurs are having a party and they love drinking sake in the Japanese card game Tokkuri Taking. Players supply more sake in tokkuri, which are traditional drinking vessels from Asia, or play cards to drink from tokkuri hoping to empty them out completely. Empty bottles score points and leftover bottles lose points. Each round the winner take chips from losing players until one player is out of chips and then the overall winner is declared.

My Thoughts

• Tokkuri Taking exemplifies Japanese game design to me. They are unafraid to experiment to create a unique card game that is excellent the majority of the time and only falls flat on some edge cases. For this game, the weakness can be the scoring.
• Scoring can create vastly different experiences with each play. Some games end in one round when a player does well and someone has to give them all their chips. Or chips can get exchanged back and forth with no players going bankrupt, dragging the game on well past the 15 minute box time.
• Ending after the number of rounds equal to the player count or early if a player bankrupts is best to prevent the game from overstaying it’s welcome.

• While the theme is largely irrelevant to the game, it is so ridiculous that is makes the game more appealing.
• There is a tension similar to card games like L.L.A.M.A., where you are either hoping that someone makes the change you need or doesn’t affect what you need in play. In this case, playing a new tokkuri to let you play your card with more numbers, or not drinking from the bottles that have the perfect level for you to complete them.
• Playing a card at just the right time to drink from 3 or 4 bottles and empty multiple feels extra satisfying.
• The box size was increased from the original Japanese edition, but is still small. This gives space for the point chips that are included in the Bright Eye Games edition.
• Passing the troublemaker card around and baiting your opponents into drinking from your dummy bottle adds a small dash of meanness without verging into take that territory.