Japanese Board Games and Card Games: Beyond Shogi and Go
By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
When most people think of Japanese games — in the traditional sense, the games played at a board or a table rather than on a screen — they think of two things: shogi (Japanese chess) and go (the territory-claiming stone game). Both are genuine and deeply developed games with rich traditions, professional tournaments, and centuries of accumulated strategic theory.
But there is an entire ecosystem of Japanese games — traditional, adapted, and contemporary — that is almost entirely invisible to international observers and that tells a more complete and more interesting story about how Japanese culture plays.
I want to introduce some of this ecosystem: the traditional games that most Japanese people have played, the card games that are specific to Japanese culture, the contemporary trading card game industry that Japan has built into a global phenomenon, and the broader culture of table gaming that has developed in Japan alongside the more visible world of video games.
Hanafuda: The Flower Card Game
Hanafuda (花札) — literally “flower cards” — is a traditional Japanese card game using a deck of 48 cards in twelve suits, each suit representing a month of the year and containing four cards depicting the specific plants, flowers, and animals associated with that month.
The visual design of hanafuda cards is among the most beautiful in the world of card games. The January suit depicts the pine tree with a crane; February depicts plum blossoms with a warbler; March depicts cherry blossoms with a curtain; April depicts wisteria with a cuckoo; and so on through the year, with December depicting paulownia and a phoenix. The cards are small — approximately 5.5 cm by 3 cm — printed on thick, lacquered stock.
Hanafuda has a specific historical connection that makes it one of the most interesting game histories in Japan: it was one of Nintendo’s original products. Before Nintendo was a video game company — before it made playing cards in the Western sense — it manufactured hanafuda cards, beginning in 1889 when Fusajiro Yamauchi (the great-grandfather of later Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi) founded the company specifically to produce hanafuda.
The games played with hanafuda are multiple, but the most commonly played is Koi-Koi — a two-player game in which players compete to collect specific combinations of cards (yaku) that score points, with the option to continue playing for higher stakes (koi-koi, meaning “come on”) or to stop and collect current points. The strategy involves reading the opponent’s developing hand while building your own combinations, with a specific risk-reward decision at each scoring opportunity.
Hanafuda is not widely played in contemporary Japan — it is associated primarily with older generations and with the New Year holiday period, when traditional games of various kinds see increased play. But it retains cultural significance and a specific aesthetic status: the cards are collector’s objects as much as game equipment, and various manufacturers produce premium versions in lacquered boxes suitable for gifting.
The Nintendo origin note deserves emphasis: the company that produced Mario, Zelda, and the Nintendo Switch began by manufacturing these beautiful small cards. The continuity between hanafuda and Nintendo is one of the more interesting historical threads in Japanese popular culture.
Karuta: The Poetry Card Game
Karuta (かるた) — the word is derived from the Portuguese carta (card), reflecting the Portuguese introduction of card games to Japan in the 16th century — is a category of Japanese card game that encompasses several distinct formats, the most culturally significant being Uta-garuta (poem karuta).
The most famous form of uta-garuta is Hyakunin Isshu Karuta — based on the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, an anthology of one hundred classical Japanese poems compiled in the 13th century. The game uses two sets of cards: yomi-fuda (reading cards) that display the complete text of each poem, and tori-fuda (taking cards) that display only the lower half (the final three lines) of each poem.
One player reads the first half of a poem aloud. All other players compete to find and touch the correct tori-fuda — the card displaying the second half of the poem — before anyone else. The player who touches the most cards wins.
The competitive form of this game — kyōgi karuta — is played at extraordinary speed and with extreme skill. Top competitive karuta players have memorised all hundred poems completely, can identify the correct card from the first syllable of the poem’s reading, and react in milliseconds. Competitive karuta matches are conducted in absolute silence, with players in formal seiza position, moving with the specific explosive precision of trained physical reflexes.
Chihayafuru — the manga and anime series about competitive karuta that I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog — is the work that brought karuta to international attention, and the series’ popularity has driven a measurable increase in karuta participation in Japan. The game’s specific combination of literary culture (the classical poems), competitive athletics (the physical speed and precision required at the competitive level), and traditional aesthetics has attracted audiences that conventional sports do not reach.
Mah-jong: Japan’s Version of a Chinese Game
Japanese mājan (mahjong) is played with four players, using 136 tiles (not 144 as in some international variants), following rules that differ from Chinese, Hong Kong, and Western mahjong in specific ways that have been developed through decades of Japanese rule evolution.
Japanese mahjong’s distinctive features include: the riichi rule (declaring your hand is one tile from completion and locking your discards), the dora bonus tiles (specific tiles that provide bonus points when held in the winning hand), and a specific scoring system that rewards both the value of the winning hand and the rarity of the winning pattern.
Japanese mahjong has developed a specific subculture — janso (mahjong parlours) where games are played against other customers in a social setting — and a significant professional competitive scene (professional mahjong organisations that run tournaments and leagues). Online mahjong platforms, particularly Tenhou, have large and active player communities.
The manga and anime Akagi and Kaiji — both by Nobuyuki Fukumoto — are mahjong-themed works that present the game as a backdrop for psychological drama and existential stakes, and have significantly shaped how mahjong is perceived in Japanese popular culture: as a game of not merely mathematical skill but of psychological warfare, of reading opponents, of managing the specific pressures of play under stakes.
Trading Card Games: Yu-Gi-Oh! and the International Market
Japan’s contribution to the trading card game (TCG) industry is one of the most commercially significant cultural exports in the entertainment sector, and it begins with two specific franchises.
Pokémon Trading Card Game and Yu-Gi-Oh! Official Card Game — both Japanese-origin TCGs — are among the highest-grossing trading card games in the world, generating combined annual revenues in the billions of dollars.
The Pokémon TCG is the simpler of the two in structural terms — its rules are designed for accessibility, reflecting the franchise’s commitment to being appropriate for children — and has developed enormous collector value for specific rare cards, particularly original series first editions. The specific investment mania around Pokémon cards that occurred internationally in 2020-2021 — driven by YouTuber unboxing content and nostalgia for the franchise among adults who had collected as children — produced price levels for certain cards that no functional analysis of the cards as game pieces could justify. The card as collectible object and the card as game piece have almost entirely separated in the high-end Pokémon card market.
Yu-Gi-Oh! — developed by Konami from the manga series by Kazuki Takahashi — is the more complex competitive TCG and maintains a large active competitive player community. The competitive scene for Yu-Gi-Oh! is global, with regional and world championship events that attract thousands of participants.
The Contemporary Tabletop Scene: Analog Games in the Digital Age
Japan has, in the past decade, developed an active contemporary analog game culture — the international tabletop gaming renaissance that has driven the popularity of games like Catan, Pandemic, Ticket to Ride, and various others in Western markets has found an enthusiastic Japanese audience.
Board game cafés — establishments where customers pay an access fee and can play from a large library of board games while consuming food and drink — have proliferated in Japanese cities, particularly in Tokyo and Osaka. These establishments serve both experienced players and newcomers, typically employing staff who can teach games and facilitate play.
The Japanese tabletop gaming scene has also produced original Japanese-designed board games that have reached international attention. Hive, Azul, and various other games with Japanese designers or Japanese-influenced aesthetics have found international audiences through the international board game distribution network.
The domestic Japanese market has a specific taste profile for tabletop games that differs somewhat from the international market: Japanese players tend to prefer shorter games (under ninety minutes), games with clear mechanical focus rather than complex theme integration, and games that accommodate the specifically Japanese social gaming context (where players may have limited experience and where the social atmosphere is often as important as the competitive result).
Shogi and Go: The Classical Games
I said at the beginning that most people know shogi and go when they think of Japanese games, and that I wanted to go beyond them. I should not end without acknowledging them, because they are genuine achievements.
Shogi — Japanese chess — is played on a 9×9 board with twenty pieces per side, each piece having a specific name, movement pattern, and the unique capability of promotion when it reaches the opponent’s back ranks. The most distinctive feature of shogi that distinguishes it from Western chess: captured pieces can be returned to the board by the capturing player and used as their own. This drop rule dramatically increases the game’s tactical complexity — the pool of available pieces is never depleted, and the game generates longer, more complex middlegame situations than Western chess.
The professional shogi world in Japan is one of the most developed professional gaming organizations in the world — the Japan Shogi Association manages a professional ranking system, tournament structure, and various titles whose holders are among the most publicly recognized sports figures in Japan. The emergence of Yoshiharu Habu in the 1990s — winning multiple titles simultaneously and dominating professional shogi for decades — elevated the game to mainstream media attention. More recently, Sota Fujii — who became the youngest person to achieve professional rank at 14, and who has subsequently achieved all eight major titles simultaneously — has generated a level of popular interest in shogi unprecedented in the modern era.
Go — played on a 19×19 grid with black and white stones, each player claiming territory by surrounding it — is the more ancient and arguably the more profound of the two games. The mathematics of go — the branching factor of possible moves is so large that computer analysis was long considered impossible — was famously solved by DeepMind‘s AlphaGo in 2016, when the AI defeated the world’s top ranked human player, an event that had a specific cultural impact in Japan beyond the game itself.
Both games deserve more than a paragraph. Both have their own extensive literature, their own beauty, their own specific pleasures. I will leave them here and suggest that anyone who wants to go deeper has a very rewarding rabbit hole available to them.
Why Games Matter in Japanese Culture
I want to make a concluding argument about why the game — not just the video game, not just the card game, but the game as a category of human activity — matters particularly in Japanese culture.
Japan has developed, across multiple game categories and multiple historical periods, a specific relationship with games as contexts for serious skill development and genuine competition. The shogi professional who has spent decades developing mastery of a game that is simultaneously a strategic discipline and an aesthetic practice; the competitive karuta player who has memorised a hundred classical poems to play a physical reflex game; the competitive mahjong player navigating the psychological complexity of a four-player tile game — these are people who have found in games something that goes beyond entertainment.
They have found a domain in which effort and talent can be combined and measured, in which excellence is possible and recognizable, and in which the specific Japanese values of mastery, discipline, and sustained effort find expression in a context that is both serious and pleasurable.
This is, I think, the deepest function of games in Japanese culture — not entertainment alone, but the provision of a legitimate and honoured domain for the pursuit of excellence through sustained practice. The game is the context; the mastery is the goal; the pleasure comes from the pursuit.
This is a value that translates across every type of game that Japan has taken seriously, from the classical strategy games of centuries ago to the trading cards that children collect today.
The playing is serious. The seriousness is joyful.
Both things at once, which is very Japanese.
— Yoshi 🎴 Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? You might also like: “Japanese Gaming Culture: From Arcade Cabinets to Nintendo Switch” and “Retro Gaming in Japan: Why the Past Never Really Left” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
