Someone described Gudetama to me as “Hello Kitty for millennials”. I’m at that age where I recognize Hello Kitty and the resulting aesthetic, but that’s about it. So I popped over to YouTube to find out more about this little lazy egg. What I found was a playlist of over 600 short videos, unsurprisingly, all in Japanese. It’s adorable, and I wish there were English dubbed versions.
Gudetama: The Tricky Egg Card Game, is a fairly straightforward trick-taking game that falls into the Northern European family of games known as Cucumber.
Each round consists of seven tricks, with the winner of each trick playing the lead card in the following trick. On each player’s turn, they will play one card, that card can either be of equal or greater value as the highest card in play or the lowest card they have in their hand. The highest card played wins the trick. In the seventh trick of the round things unfold a little differently. You DON’T want to win the final trick of the round. That player scores a number of points equal to whatever card they played to win, keeping that card aside to track their score. When a player has scored 21 points, the game ends and the person with the lowest score wins.
There are two cards that have additional abilities: 14 and 1. When a player takes the trick with a 14, they choose another player to lead the next trick. If a 1 is played in the final trick, everybody scores the card they played that trick regardless of who played the highest card.
There are two versions of this game, the regular version and the holiday version. As far as I’m aware they play exactly the same. The only difference is in the artwork. This probably doesn’t reeeeeaaaaaally need to be said, but the holiday edition has holiday themed art. The art is every bit as adorable as the cartoon, featuring the titular character in all its lazy glory. Bacon gets used as everything from a sled to the roof of a house. There’s mistletoe and presents, and because there are more winter holidays than just Christmas, there’s even a dreidel spinning away. The only thing I wish they had added was some Japanese kanji as a nod to the character’s origin.
Gudetama technically can be played with only two people, but it gets more challenging and fun with bigger groups. I would argue that for many gamers, one of the greatest joys of the season is being able to hopefully distract non-gamer family members away from monopoly with a modern casual/gateway game. Either version of Gudetama would definitely fill that space, but the holiday theme makes it an easier sell to your Aunt Karen. The theme is entirely pasted on here, but overall it has the making of a true holiday classic.
Oni Press can be found online at onipress.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/onipress
Renegade Game Studios is online at www.renegadegames.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/PlayRGS.
Don’t forget you can read all of our current and past holiday reviews at TheRatHole.ca/Christmas!
You’d think with as many Gudatama videos and products there would be at least one Christmas video, even just a fan-made one. Nope. So instead enjoy this Japanese version of Silent Night: “Kiyoshi, Kono Yoru” translated and performed by chiichai0cho.
[I usually try to avoid the religious standards, but this was too beautifully done not to share. -dc]