Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Welcome Demons is the latest game from designer Daniel Newman, who has a wide variety of titles under his belt. Some of you may also be familiar with his publishing company, New Mill Industries (NMI), which specializes in small and limited print runs of unusual card games. In the last couple of years, he and NMI have focused almost exclusively on shedding and trick-taking games. It is in that genre that he has created his two best-known designs, Gachapon Trick and the exquisite Mori.
I always think of NMI releases—and, by extension, Newman’s more recent designs—as equal parts game and formal experiment. The games don’t always work, but you’re unlikely to forget them. They’re always trying something. NMI’s catalogue of li’l weirdos runs deep, and with the release of Welcome Demons, it grows deeper still.
Oni Oni Oxen Free
Japanese mythology is full of stories concerning oni, these hulking demons that often live in caves and like to terrorize unfortunate people. You know ‘em. If I asked you to picture a typical Japanese demon, the picture that’d most likely pop in your mind is an oni. Most of the time, they’re evil. But the onsen town of Noboribetsu has a different relationship with its oni. There, local tradition has it, these bruisers are friendly. They protect visitors to the baths from harm.
In Welcome Demons, your job is to ferry as many Visitors to safety as you can. Each player starts the game with an identical deck of Visitors and a hand chock-full of oni. Each Visitor has an oni requirement on its left and right sides, corresponding to the oni cards you’ll need to play from your hand. Most Visitors require some combination of the three suits—the oni come in red, blue, and green, and in values between 1 and 9—but a few require an odd or even number.
A basic meld in this game consists of one Visitor and two oni. The next player can either play a single Visitor with two oni who add up to a higher value, or they can play two Visitors with three oni—the two Visitors sharing an oni that bridges both of them and fulfills the inner requirement of each—that add up to a lower total. This continues for as long as players can manage, though you are limited to no more than three Visitors in a meld. Once two players pass in a row, the current meld is discarded and a new one begins.
There isn’t much of the tension that I typically associate with shedding games, but in the case of Welcome Demons, that’s fine. It’s not that the tension is missing; it’s been replaced. Welcome Demons becomes a funny little puzzle. It also finds interactivity in unexpected places, and those unexpected places combine in suitably unexpected ways.
Each oni shows its suit on the back of the card, which tells other players quite a bit, since the number ranges are indexed by suit. Greens are 1-3, blues are 4-6, and reds are 7-9. Meanwhile, each player’s available Visitors are face-up on the table. As the game goes on, you get more and more of a sense of what your opponents are capable of playing and, crucially, what they aren’t. This brings us to the final wrinkle: when playing a new meld, so long as you’re beating a previous meld and not starting a new round, you are required to take one of the two end cards of the previous meld and incorporate it into yours.
My favorite game of Welcome Demons was one in which I was nearly or completely short suited in one suit. I had to capitalize on every opportunity I was presented with to snag a card in that suit, since I still needed to get those visitors out on the table. It was tremendous fun. The game doesn’t always deliver that adrenalized sense of enjoyment. It is often a quieter, more cerebral affair. And I’m not entirely sure as to how much depth or intentionality is possible. It may be that most of this game is throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks. But one way or another, Welcome Demons is always interesting, and that’s more than enough for me.
