Apologies to any Koi-Koi experts who will undoubtedly be upset with my fast and loose and probably not 100% accurate description of the game. The point is to get folks to play Koi-Koi Japan on their Switch so they can learn it themselves, so don't get mad at me because I'm literally just picking the first match I see without thinking about how they would actually make combos. It's my first day.
Koi-Koi is a card game variant popular in Japan that is played with Hanafuda cards. A Hanafuda deck has 48 cards where there are 12 suits representing the months of the year and then each suit has 4 cards with animals or birds or plants or whatever representing each month.
If you are a huge weeaboo nerd loser tool you'll be super popular at parties if you say "Uhm, akshually, the Nintendo company was started in 1889 and originally made Hanafuda cards which they still sell today in Japan". Or, y'know, probably better to keep that info to yourself. Nerd.
Anyway. If you want to play with Hanafuda cards for real you need to memorize all of the suits and symbols and actually learn how they all go together. Luckily for us, this video game Koi-Koi Japan basically does all of the work for you so you can get by with just the basics and don't have to memorize anything if you don't want to. I will note that it does have options to tone down how much help the game gives you, so you really could learn a lot from this game if you wanted to. But there's also no shame if you just want to let the game handle the hard stuff.
So, Koi-Koi is a game where there are 8 cards face up on the table and you are dealt 8 cards to your hand. If a card on the table matches on in your hand, you put them both in your point pile. If you don't have a match, you have to put one of your cards on the table. Then, whether you had a match or not, you draw a card and put it on the table. If the card you draw has a match, you put both cards into your point pile and draw again. Then it's your opponent's turn.
The idea is that you're collecting matched cards into your point pile in order to make specific combinations of cards called yaku. The various yaku are worth different amounts of points that all contribute to determining the ultimate winner of the game after several rounds. If you get a yaku, you have a choice to either stop the round and add up your points, or you can call "Koi-Koi" to keep that round going in order to potentially earn more points. If, however, you call "Koi-Koi" and your opponent forms their own yaku before you get another one, then your opponent gets double the points and you get zero. So there is a risk involved between trying to get more points for yourself, or potentially having your opponent get a lucky draw and take all the points.
This is where learning how to recognize all of the different cards, as well as how they combine into yaku, will help immensely when you play. You can see what cards your opponent already has in their point piles and can tell how close or far they are from making a yaku and stealing the round if you call koi-koi. Or you can totally just wing it like I do and still get by pretty well. As I said earlier, this video game handles pretty much everything for you. It shows you what matches you can make and automatically puts the yaku together and tells you how many points they're worth.
Whether you put in the effort to learn everything or just let the game handle it all, it's a really surprisingly fun game to play either way. Koi-Koi is really, really fast paced where matches can go for multiple quick rounds or you could get an incredibly lucky draw and get the overall win in just one hand. It's luck and skill and strategy and after learning even just the basics I can see why it has been popular for centuries now.
Koi-Koi Japan for Nintendo Switch costs $10 and is pretty good all around. It has a good tutorial to teach you the basics and then a neat single-player mode where you challenge players across Japan to unlock postcards of famous landmarks. There is online multiplayer as well. And there are also options to adjust how much help the game gives you. And, the game has waifus. You get to choose from several busty waifus to guide you through the world of Koi-Koi and they're all pretty great looking. As if you expected anything else from this channel. Heh.
So when you put all of this together, you can then kind of connect the dots on what's happening at the end of "Summer Wars". It all goes by so fast in the movie that it's still really hard to tell, though. It has to be noted that the movie is skipping tons of turns and not remotely showing everything that is actually happening in the game, which makes it all the more confusing for outsiders like us.
Just know that the computer lady voice is constantly calling out yaku combinations, and that when they're all screaming "Koi-Koi" they're actually being kind of risky considering the stakes they're playing with. Basically, just remember there's tons of stuff happening we aren't seeing, which makes it come across as pretty nonsensical. Obviously, having a basic knowledge of the game helps you fill in the gaps and make it seem slightly less crazy and random.
Knowing what I know now, I'd say it's also kind of funny how at the very end of the match you see everyone around the world yelling "Koi-Koi!" when almost assuredly 99% of them have no idea what it means. They're all just caught up in the moment. But it does definitely make for a very exciting finale, doesn't it? Man, I love "Summer Wars".
And know I mostly know what the heck is going on, thanks to playing Koi-Koi Japan on Nintendo Switch. The game is pretty great, has lots of options and features, and is only $10. If you're interested even a tiny bit in learning Koi-Koi, it's definitely worth picking up.
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