You’re relaxing at home, enjoying a rewatch of Akira Kurosawa’s seminal 1954 action film Seven Samurai, when a thought pops into your head: “Someone should adapt this into a co-operative version of Blackjack and also add furries.” Your heart sinks. You’re thinking those dangerous thoughts again, the ones your therapist warned you about. You entreat your brain to come back to reality as intense feelings of disassociation sweep over you once again. A few harrowing minutes pass. Gradually, you return from the abyss. You barely made it this time. You schedule another appointment with your therapist.
Two weeks later, you are on Board Game Geek browsing through Antoine Bauza’s list of published games. You really like 7 Wonders, so you want to see what else he’s made. You are just about to ask yourself why this French dude is so obsessed with China and Japan when you see it: Samurai Spirit.
It’s co-operative Blackjack.
And it has furries.
You cancel the appointment.
Of all the games in the world that don’t need to exist, I think Samurai Spirit might not need to exist the most. Thematically, it’s pure dreck, an insipid knock off of a classic piece of cinema with the nauseating addition of furry transformations. Mechanically, it’s a crude co-op puzzler largely determined by the shuffle of the deck. The production is decent enough, but decent illustrations of furry samurai men are still illustrations of furry samurai men. If you’re in the mood for a laugh, check out the “Author’s Notes” section at the end of the rulebook. In it, Bauza defends his decision to not include any female player characters by saying “as in the film, so in the game.” Yo Antoine, I don’t remember the part in the movie where Kikuchiyo turns into a giant anthropomorphic tiger! Are you mixing up some personal recordings with your Criterion Collection or something?
Anyway, Samurai Spirit is a tower defense game played over a series of three increasingly difficult rounds. Your job is to defend a village of farmhouses and families from a ruthless band of raiders. If at least one family and one farmhouse stand at the end of the third round, you win the game. The raiders are represented by a shuffled deck of cards, and each card has a number and various symbols on it. On a player’s turn they draw the top card from the raider deck and decide whether to place it to the left or right of their player board. The left side means you’re “Defending” from the raider and the right side means you’re “Confronting” the raider. I’m not sure what the thematic difference between these two actions is supposed to be, but what I do know is the left side is about collecting three different symbols and the right side is about trying to get the card numbers to add up to a specific amount without going over, exactly like Blackjack.
Each samurai is equipped with two special powers. One is activated if they manage to hit the aforementioned number on the right side of their board; the other is a persistent power they can use as they wish. Even more, should disaster loom over the head of one of their compatriots, players can choose to share this persistent power with that samurai in lieu of drawing a card. When a player does this, however, the raider card they would’ve drawn is instead added to a second deck of cards called the intruder stack. The more cards that get added to this stack, the more likely it will cause some damage to the village at the end of the round. The players can also take damage themselves in the form of “Wounds” by confronting certain raider cards or failing to defend properly. When a samurai takes its second wound that’s when they “Furry Up!” for lack of a better term and get a slight boost to their strength and abilities.
At the end of each round, the intruder stack is flipped and resolved. Every card with a flame symbol on it destroys a barricade or farmhouse. Additionally, more farmhouses and families are destroyed if players lack the corresponding symbols to the left of their player boards. After this, if at least one farmhouse and one family remain, higher-value raider cards are shuffled into the deck to make the next round more challenging (unless it’s already the third round, of course. In that case, you just won the game. Congratulations!).
Samurai Spirit feels like a prototype, like the result of a weekend design challenge to try to add a theme to Blackjack. And like Blackjack (unless you’re gambling), turns are rote and devoid of excitement. First, check to see if anyone is in dire need of your power. No? Do a quick estimation of the probability that the card you draw will cause you to bust. If so, pass. If not (or if busting won’t be too disastrous), draw the card. If it’s a symbol you need, put it on the left side of your board. Otherwise, put it on the right. That’s it. That is the essential thought process of every single turn you take in the game. Talk about repetitive! Playing the game feels like following a flowchart, and a pretty simple one at that. The only idea here that is even remotely interesting is the power-sharing mechanic. Unfortunately, the powers are entirely your standard deck-stacking, luck-mitigation fare (place your draw at the bottom of the deck and draw another, etc.), so it’s hard to get very enthusiastic about that either.
I understand what your turn is supposed to feel like: a classic press-your-luck, risk/reward proposition where you are weighing the pros and cons of taking another hit from the deck. Even sharing your power has pros and cons because it causes the intruder stack to grow and makes the end-of-round events harder to survive. Here’s the issue with that: collecting symbols, adding up numbers, and luck-mitigation are such bland core mechanics they make your decisions feel pointless. I’m not saying the game has NO depth. I’m saying the game is not interesting enough for me to care.
Another issue is how clumsy and contrived the narrative is. The pre-determined difficulty jumps of the raider deck make the game feel overly scripted, and the “Furry Up!” (I’m sticking with it) wound mechanics are just strange. Like, I’m supposed to WANT to get wounded so I can become bear/wolf/monkey man and increase my powers? Even without the furries, I’m having trouble vibing with that.
Lastly, the shuffle of the deck and which samurai the players use have way too much of an effect on the game’s difficulty (Bauza even admits as much in his “Author’s Notes” though he tries to spin it into a positive). The randomized deck can render one samurai useless and another indispensable, creating a volatility in the game system that is not fun to contend with.
Samurai Spirit is rough and amateurish. Its theme is perplexing and its mechanics are pedestrian. Certain players that enjoy co-operative min/max-ing will likely be able to get a play or two out of it, but not much more. The puzzle the game presents pales in comparison to meatier co-ops like Spirit Island, Space Alert, Robinson Crusoe, or even Pandemic, so there just does not seem to be much of a reason to bother with it at all. Blackjack, the cinematic works of Akira Kurosawa, and furry-dom shared nothing in this life before Samurai Spirit. And if you ask me (or your therapist), it probably should’ve stayed that way.
Samurai Spirit gets a rating of TWO out of FIVE, indicating it is NOT RECOMMENDED.