Happy Guest Review Wednesday! I am so incredibly excited for us all today. We have a new guest reviewer!

Lee Sanhwa is a South Korean science fiction writer. He is best known for his Yuri cyberpunk detective novel An Error Has Occurred (오류가 발생했습니다, 2018). For a more detailed profile and full list of works, please visit his website.

He has happily volunteered to review a Yuri board game that I first mentioned in 2021. Please give Lee Sanhwa-nim a warm Okazu welcome in the comments!

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There are at least hundreds of board games out there covering every possible niche theme from birdwatching to sharksploitation films, and Yuri is no exception. I’ll not say there are plenty of them, but still, there are some! If you are looking for a cooperative game with an emphasis on Yuri story-telling, then you should check out Yuri made by Everyone (which is basically a spin-off version of BL made by Everyone, a BL-themed board game). And if you want something more competitive, then here’s Yuri Ranbou, a “High-speed competitive Yuri harem building card game.”

General Information

Players: 2-3

Time: 10 Min

Age: 9+ (Difficulty-wise, not content-wise)

Yuri Ranbou is developed by Stromatosoft, a Japanese game production company now in development of 3D Yuri dungeon crawler RPG Witches & Lilies. In Yuri Ranbou, you become one of six girls and compete with your opponents to acquire as many other girls as possible. How? By declaring the relationship between you and each round’s love interest. Maybe she is your childhood friend. Maybe you really hate her. Or maybe you and her have kissed before……. Whoever declared the most effective relationship wins the girl.

Each game begins with a “Relationship cards” draft, where you choose which card to keep in hand and which to give away. Then in each round, a “Lover” card is presented and all players simultaneously play a relationship card from their hands. Each relationship has different strength points(1 to 10) and effects. Some of them are “Encounter” cards, which take their effect when you play them. Others are “Memory” cards, which take effect only after you lose a round by playing them. Some cards specialize in countering only the strongest relationships, so even if you play “Kiss of the Vow”(strength 10), you can still lose to “I’m Curious About Her”(Strength 3, makes the weakest card win this round). After completing all three rounds, whoever acquired the most girls wins. 

The whole game consists of 35 cards, but you only need 16 of them(6 lover cards and 10 relationship cards) to play. The rest are 3 rule summary cards, 6 character profile cards and 10 illustration cards. As you can expect, the gameplay is surprisingly fast. All three rounds can easily be finished in less than a minute! Truly a “High-speed” card game. But for its volume and playtime, Yuri Ranbou is quite an intense experience. Choosing the right card in card drafts, building your strategy, and guessing your opponents’ hands correctly in each round are all important to win the game. 

About its Yuri aspect, Yuri Ranbou shows some interesting considerations even at the game mechanic level. For example, if three players acquire exactly one girl each, it’s “True Coupling” and everyone wins! I also found it interesting that the “Childhood Friend” card is somewhat…weak, especially compared to “I’m Curious About Her” or “I Really Hate You”. Illustrations done by Aomushi (あおむし) fit well to the game, with their characteristic bright-but-omnious atmosphere. You will easily be able to imagine how the six characters world speak, behave, envy, cry, snap, etc. 

With its small volume and simple gameplay, Yuri Ranbou is surely not a game you want to play over and over again until you master it. And you may find it strange that the game allows you to acquire a maximum of three girls, which is only a bare minimum of what you can call a “harem”. But I think this simpleness and compactness are what makes Yuri Ranbou a well-designed game. You can bring it anywhere, play it anytime, and simulate a dramatic Yuri love story with anyone. That’s enough, isn’t it?

Ratings:

Art – 8
Gameplay – 7 (Simple but fun!)
Characters – 1 (Names and profiles provided, but they’re basically just stereotypes)
Service – 1 (There’s kissing, and that’s all)
Yuri – 7 

Overall – 7

I’ve purchased Yuri Ranbou at a board game store in Yodobashi Camera Shinjuku Nishiguchi. As far as I know, Stromatosoft’s official online store does not provide global shipping.  

Erica here: We can use a buying service like Buyee or a shipping service, if you have an account with one to get it shipped out of Japan if you’re motivated to grab a copy.

Thank you so much for the terrific review!I just picked up a copy of 오류가 발생했습니다 on BooksonKorea.com – they do overseas shipping. I can’t wait to read it!