The story
Fiction and adapted settings written by Akitsora Gaming for this title, including invented dialogue and events. This is not a historical or folklore reference. The rules and specification tables define the gameplay and math.
Along the bustling main street of Edo, townsfolk crowd shoulder to shoulder.
Step back three paces and squint—that crowd is a single giant face winking back at you!
I. Kuniyoshi's Comic Illusions
In late-Edo Japan, the ukiyo-e master Utagawa Kuniyoshi delighted the public with his playful composite portraits known as yose-e. From across the room, the woodblock print showed a single scowling or grinning head; up close, nose, brow, cheeks, and chin were formed by dozens of tangled townsfolk bending and tumbling together.
Our crowded Edo street brings eight original trades to life: the barrel-lifting strongman, the carpenter, the fishmonger, the hairdresser, the fleet-footed courier, the palanquin bearer, the soba seller, and the gardener. Whenever neighbours of the same trade gather in a cluster along the avenue, they clear the street for fresh arrivals.
II. Squares That Merge into Living Faces
Whenever a winning cluster of townsfolk happens to stand in a neat square on the grid, those figures refuse to leave the street. Instead, they lock arms and merge on the spot into a blinking, breathing big face pinned right to the pavement, multiplying any later cluster of the same trade that touches its edge.
Even better, a big face has room to grow as the crowd gathers around it. When a large enough cluster of matching townsfolk presses against its border, the face stretches outward by a full ring, pulling the surrounding cells into its cheeks and wide grin while everyone else tumbles past behind it.
III. The Giant Face That Swallows the Street
Once a face expands to its grandest size on the avenue, its appetite knows no bounds. On the initial stop and on every cascade step that follows, the giant face opens wide and swallows every single townsperson standing in the ring around it—diagonals included—adding to its multiplier with each person gulped down.
As the swallowed cells refill from the top of the street, fresh clusters form along the avenue in rapid succession, feeding the face again and again until the overfed giant lets out a comical sneeze that rattles the wooden signboards all down the block.
IV. The Publisher's Seal and the Yose-e Festival
Stamp enough red publisher's seals across the street once the cascades settle, and the paper lanterns light up for the Yose-e Festival. Carved cherry-wood woodblocks join the crowd as wilds, and every big face forged on the street stays pinned in place for the entire festival, growing and swallowing from spin to spin.
By the final spins of the festival, a giant face that has feasted on half the neighbourhood can carry a towering multiplier across the street. This rowdy tribute to Edo printmaking is the game's theme rather than a promise: every spin's outcome is decided solely by the server's random number generator.