Shingon Karuta társasjáték

Angol leírás

真言カルタ (Shingon Karuta) is a Japanese card game of Karuta, using Buddhist mantras (Shingon) and artwork.

In a karuta game, players try to snatch the matching card from the other player's tableau, or protect their own card by covering it first. Typically, a separate player acts as a Reader by reading out loud from a separate deck. Players then deduce from what is read which card on display is the target, and move swiftly.

In this game of Shingon Karuta, the designer aimed to improve the education of Buddhist iconography. There is a deck of Bodhisattva cards and a deck of Shingon cards. A Bodhiattva is a person on the path to Buddhahood, and such people are widely depicted in temple artwork, in sculpture and painting. Shingon Buddhism is one of the main schools in Japan, and the Shingon deck has sections of mantras that relate to specific Bodhisattva images.

As the Shingon card is read out, each player tries to identify the matching Bodhisattva card and snatch it or keep it.

The game was originally published in 2017, but revised in 2019 to unify the artwork to one style. The designer realised that players could simply learn the deck by the different style of artworks, and not by learning the actual Bodhisattvas. By making all the art unified, the game becomes much harder.

In 2018, the designer published an explansion set of 10 more Bodhisattva cards and 10 matching Shingon cards. Players could just play with this expansion set alone. This deck was integrated into the 2019 edition too.

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