Technically I started this in October or November of 2024, but I wanted to wait to formally create the Work here until it felt like this was something that had legs.
Background
I was watching a documentary about Musashi. When I was younger, I had read The Book of Five Rings, and was more or less familiar with him and the lore around him. I read Eiji Yoshikawa’s “Musashi” series in paperback – this is generally considered to be mostly fabricated but “based on the true story,” like many lore-heavy biopics.
This made me want to make to design a game based on that lore, specifically around dueling.
Overview
Design a dueling card game that is based on the book Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. The game would be thematically built on the source material and comprise of 4 rounds of drafting followed by 1 round of combat.
The steps I’m envisioning:
- Brainstorm and draft game rules
- Prepare prototype scaffolding
- Iterate on rules until game coalesces and stabilizes and feels “fun”
- Create a semi-final / professional looking prototype
Publication is not a requirement, just getting the game into a complete state.
Design constraints
The initial concept I envisioned was that it would have these constraints:
Heavy thematic derivation from the source material
I wanted to incorporate as many quotes as possible from the source material. I want the actions in the game to feel like the concepts he discusses. I want this game to feel like the game based on Book of Five Rings. This is where the previous work Compositing Translations of The Book of Five Rings comes into the picture. That was specifically prep work for this project.
Two player duel only
Musashi does discuss large-scale strategy but the book is predominantly about 1:1 combat. This no grand melee here, just you and your opponent.
There would be no concept of “health”, “injury”, or any similar tropes common to combat games
What even is a “hit point” really? This has been something I had been randomly pondering at the time. Swords are deadly weapons, both players represent swordsman that have trained their whole lives and are presumably expert handlers – the duel should represent the lethality of this: You fight until one person cannot stop the attack of the other.
No mention of “honor” anywhere
This is another trope common in most games set in feudal Japan. In the six translations I have read through, I don’t believe I saw the word “honor” mentioned once. If it was mentioned in passing, it certainly was not a central point of the book.
The game should focus on the training as much as the dueling
What the book does mention, over and over, is the notion of endless training, perfecting technique, and a no-nonsense and direct strategy to always seek victory in combat. I knew that I wanted the game to make the notion of “training” be a first-class feature, in some form. Not in the “practicing outside of dueling”, but rather the process of training is part of the game experience itself.
Cards as a medium
This was a personal choice. I didn’t want to make a tactical game, I wanted a game that focused on making choices and then having a way of recording those choices to re-use later. Cards are an easy and accessible means for this.