Wow, it’s been a while. Recently, while playing with my wife and kids a game of karuta with our Hyakunin Isshu set, I learned about a simple, introductory way to enjoy the game without spending a lot of time learning the poems or mastering the rules of the competition. This simple game is called bōzu-mekuri (坊主めくり).

The rules are nicely explained here in Japanese, but goes like this:

1. Two or more people sit around in a circle.
2. Shuffle all 100 of the picture cards (yomifuda), then make a stack face-down. This stack is called the yamafuda (lit. “card mountain”).
   • Alternatively, you can split the stack into two stacks, three stacks, or even a ring of cards. My family plays with two stacks as shown above.
   • No matter how you deal the cards, they need to be face down.
3. Players take turns drawing one card from any yamafuda stack.
4. Depending on what kind of card a person gets, one of three things will happen:
   • If the card is a picture of a nobleman (tono), simply add it to your personal pile.
   • If the card is a picture of a Buddhist monk (bōzu), you lose all your cards. Put your cards into a pile somewhere in the middle, near the original yamafuda stack, but face up. If there are cards already there, just add to the pile.
   • If the card is a court lady (himé) then you get all the cards from the face-up pile.
5. Once done, pass the turn to the next player.
6. When all the yamafuda cards are exhausted, whoever has the most cards at the end wins the game.

One quick note: the poet Semimaru (poem 10) looks like a monk card, but the poet wasn’t a monk. This leads to a frequent confusion by players: does Semimaru count as a monk, or as a nobleman, or … something else? This actually did come up in a recent game I played with friends: we couldn’t figure how if he was tono or bōzu and apparently many Japanese people have been stumped by this.

The Hyakunin Isshu Daijiiten, which I mentioned here, considers Semimaru a bōzu (monk) for the purposes of the game, even though he wasn’t actually an ordained monk.

However, my other new book jokes that the author has a house-rule whereby if anyone draws the Semimaru card, then everyone loses their cards.

You can treat Semimaru the way you treat a Joker in poker cards: decide ahead of time what it means, and play accordingly.

Anyhow, once you get a set of hyakunin isshu karuta cards, try it out with your friends some time! I found the game very easy to learn, and fun to play with 3-4 people. More people the better. There are lots of house-rules possible in bozu-mekuri, so feel free to choose rules that you and the other players enjoy.

Enjoy!