Fukuzatsu+ is Balatro meets Magic the Gathering. Destruction of poker decks and breaking of friendships ahead.
Fukuzatsu 複雑 (complicated) is a cutthroat card game steeped in mystery. Was it created in the late 1800s? Is it also called “Taured Poker,” after Taured, the mythical land from which it originated? Is it the result of a crazed poker player demanding a fortune teller change his fate? Or is it, simply, a technicolor Balatro homage from 21st century TTRPG designer Neon Rot?
It’s all of these things!
Standard gameplay is chaotic, but straightforward. Each player wields two decks: a Rider-Waite tarot deck and a deck of standard playing cards. The playing cards are for playing poker(-ish). The Rider-Waite deck represents powers, moves that allow competitors to deface, destroy, transform, or otherwise steal one another’s playing cards. And you can cheat! Kinda. If you’re caught, you’ve gotta give half your chips to the person who caught you.
Fukuzatsu+ is the game’s second print edition. It boasts fuzzy, technicolor CRT-flavored illustrations. It includes classic rules as well as the most up-to-date variations such as: Iron Man Mode (in which every card is destroyed), House of Jokes (employing rule-switching Jokers), Attacarrat (battle mode), Soloterrare (a solo deck-powered horror adventure), Coulette (deck-based Russian Roulette), Black Fish (a co-op fishing challenge), and Southern Rules (an extra-chaotic game flavor from the south of Taured, requiring such moves as stapling cards together). This second edition also includes Legacy Rules, in which players continue using their patchwork collected, altered, f-ed up decks in game after game until less than 10 cards remain.
- For 2-4 players
- Requires poker chips as well as one Rider-Waite tarot deck and one deck of (inexpensive, defacement-ready) playing cards per player
- 150 pages, full-color – game is the second edition, “Fukuzatsu+”
