High School Election (2004)

This is a game where you choose a character with some different stats, and then play cards and draw new cards from the stack until the stack runs out of cards. The one with the most "votes" in the end gets elected to high scool president and thus wins the game.

It's a humour-based, hilarious but rather complicated card game where a lot of the enjoyment relies on you knowing the clichées in japanese animation concerning high school comedy. Though there's a lot of japanese text on the cards, it's playable without knowledge of japanese if you have a translation sitting nearby. Moreover, you learn what the cards do rather quickly.

Game description
There are two card piles: the play card pile and the "standard vote"-pile. The "standard vote"-pile contains only cards with a number of votes, 1 to 6 on each card. The play card pile consists of special vote cards (can be worth a lot, and also may have special powers), action cards (that affect other players) or event cards (all players have to sumbit to certain conditions).

At your turn, you draw a play card and (unless it's an event card wich affets all players) may either take 2 actions OR draw yet another game card. Actions include drawing a standard vote card, playing a game card from your hand, or using a special power (from your special vote card or your character).

The "standard vote" cards are kept hidden, people can see how many you have but not how much they're worth. The special vote cards however, (which are worth much, representing votes from whole clubs like the baseball team, the newpaper club and so on), are placed before you. These can be "attacked" by action cards, either nullified or stolen. Some action cards can cancel other action cards, and some special votes cards can be immune to attacks like these if you discard cards from your hand etc.

So the game goes on until you've taken 2 laps through the draw pile of game cards. When the fourth event card is drawn, game ends immediately, and the person with most votes win.

As said, much of the flavour of this game consists of clichées in high school anime. The names of the standard vote-cards are sometimes hilarious. Some one-vote cards are named "the ghost girl who nobody has ever seen", "the maid robot", "the one who secretly goes to a certain market selling certain home made comics", other cards include "the I don't know whatever" (3 votes), "the ones with a boyfriend" (2 votes), "the diet girls" (4 votes) et cetera. The special vote cards are sypical high school clubs in japanese high schools.

A very nice game but probably only for those who enjoy the style.

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