I knew of <PERSON> from his presence in the Street Fighter scene long before he started making board games. He used to post on alt.games.sf2, where I lurked back in the day and occasionally cracked wise. He was mildly famous for winning a few good-sized tournaments back in the 90s, and he's still pretty good, although not a top contender. My involvement in the scene was never that active, but I usually keep an eye on it for nostalgia's sake. When I heard he was moving into the analog design space I was quite intrigued -- and now, after a couple of warm-ups, he's finally released his main design, Yomi. Yomi is a fixed-deck, non-customizable card game that is designed to replicate the mental side of video fighting games like Street Fighter, Virtua Fighter, and so on. But how can a card game replicate this? Well....
Let There Be ROUND ONE: FIGHT!
Street Fighter is the most popular fighting game series of all time and hardly needs introduction, but for those who are too old or young to remember its prime, or only gave it a cursory glance, it's a fantasy martial arts beat-em-up. You have a joystick and various attack buttons that you use to produce different moves in different situations -- your "hard punch" button might do a spinning backfist if you're standing up, a ducking uppercut if you start from a crouch, a flying chop if you press it when you're airborne, and so on. Each move has varying degrees of reward, utility and risk depending on the game state: the ducking uppercut might be great against opponents who are jumping at you, mediocre if they're standing next to you, useless if they're on the other side of the screen, and suicidal if they're crouching close to you. This changes slightly per opponent -- one guy might have a cool jumping kick that beats your ducking uppercut, so you'll have to find a different solution versus him.
The point of all that is to use the right moves in the right position at the right time, to do enough damage to your opponent to knock him out, before he does the same to you. If you KO the other guy, you win the round. Best of 3 rounds wins the game.
As a video game, there's an undeniable element of dexterity. If you can't reliably pull off moves in a clutch situation, or you flub the timing of a series of hits and whiff an attack, leaving yourself open to be counterattacked, then it's going to be tough to compete. However, the dexterity requirement, while it sucks to struggle through the learning curve where you know what to do but your brain can't get your fingers to do it, is surmountable. 755
After a period of practice, you have the basics down about as well as anyone. And yet you still get beat by people who are no more dextrous than you. Why does this happen? Well, because they can do two things better than you: reading and valuation.
"Valuation" means correctly calculating the situational risk and reward of any given move at your disposal at that point in time. Throwing a fireball at your opponent might be great from six feet away, but from two feet it gives the enemy time to block and trip you, and from nine feet away it gives him time to leap over it and hit you while you're recovering from the move. So you have to know not only what your character can do, but what your opponent's character can do.
"Reading" is the poor English translation of the Japanese word yomi, which gives us <PERSON>'s title. The actual concept is something like predicting or knowing -- like getting inside your opponent's head. At the start of a round, there's a lot of back-and-forth jockeying for position, but eventually the flow of the match reaches points where you must act. However, given the nature of the game, and the speed at which the match unfolds, it is impossible for the nervous system to react in time. If you wait to see what I do, then by the time your eyes send the signal to your brain, your brain interprets it, analyzes the correct response, sends the signal for the right response down to your fingers -- it's too late. I've already hit you, thrown you, or whatever. So you can't react, you have to predict what I'm going to do. If you predict wrong then you lose the exchange: take damage, get put in a worse position, or most likely both. But if you predict right, then you get to do that to me. And that's where reading comes in. Can you predict what I'm going to do? 884