Wouter & Ymke 
In Gangs of Kyoto, you’re cats. Not heroes, not warriors, just cats doing what cats do best… wandering off when they probably shouldn’t.
You head into the streets of Kyoto, looking for food, running into other animals, finding random stuff. It all sounds pretty harmless, but the longer you stay out, the more you’re pushing it. At some point, your cat just doesn’t make it back in time.
And that’s really the whole idea of the game. Stay out long enough to get something good, but not so long that you lose everything. Simple, but it works. Also, very on-brand for cats. No sense of timing whatsoever.
👥 2-5 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 15 minutes
📝 Designer: Rüdiger Dorn
🎨 Artwork: Jérémie Fleury
🏢 Publisher: Matagot (Review copy provided by Geronimo Games)
Gameplay Overview
The game plays in rounds, and everyone takes turns being the active player.
On your turn, you draw as many cards as there are players and put them face down. Then you start flipping them one by one, choosing which card to reveal each time, and you decide who gets it. That can be yourself, or someone else at the table. Everyone gets exactly one card during your turn, and those cards build a row in front of each player.
Each card has a number, and you just keep adding them up. That total is basically how long your cat has been out. As soon as you get a card, you check your total. If you’re still under 13, you’re fine and you resolve whatever is on the card. If you hit 13 or more, that’s it. The round ends immediately, no warning, no “just one more card”.
If there were still cards left to give out, they just go back on top of the deck, so rounds can sometimes end faster than you expect. Then comes the painful part. The player who went over loses everything from that round, while everyone else keeps only their bell cards as points and discards the rest. So yeah, you don’t actually need to play well. You just need someone else to mess up first.
There are also special cards mixed in. Some go straight to your score, which is always nice. Others force you to draw extra cards immediately, which sounds fun until it isn’t. There are cards that let you refuse a future card, which feels great when you’re about to go over, and one that lets you go up to 18 instead of 13, but only for you.
The game ends as soon as someone reaches 13 bells. If multiple players hit that at the same time, the one with the most bells wins.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
It’s just cards. 110 of them, and that’s the whole game. No board, no tokens, nothing else. Which honestly, I don’t mind at all for this type of game.
The artwork is probably what will catch your eye first. It’s colorful, a bit playful, and leans into that “cats causing trouble at night” idea. Kyoto looks nice, with warm colors, lanterns, and that evening atmosphere.
The cards are easy to read, with the number on top and symbols at the bottom. After a round or two, you don’t really need to think about it anymore. And the cats… yeah, they’re great. Some look very proud of themselves, others look like they’ve made a series of bad decisions. Again, very accurate.
Nothing feels overproduced, but it all fits together well. It’s clear, readable, and matches the tone of the game.
Our Experience
Getting it to the table is easy. You explain it in a few minutes, and you’re playing. No real barrier there. What I like is that you’re always involved. Even when it’s not your turn, someone is deciding where cards go, and you kind of care about every flip, so it keeps moving.
But at the same time… it doesn’t always feel like you’re in control of what’s happening. You decide who gets a card, sure, but you don’t know what’s coming next. A lot of the time you’re just hoping it doesn’t backfire immediately. And it does backfire. Often.
After a few rounds, we stopped thinking about it as “don’t go over 13” and more like “please let someone else go over first”. That shift is where the game actually becomes fun. There were a few moments where someone clearly pushed their luck too far, and the rest of the table just watched it happen. No one says anything, but everyone knows. Those are the moments that stick.
With four or five players, the table just feels more alive. There’s more going on, more reactions, more chances for things to go wrong. With two players, it’s fine, it works, but it feels more controlled and a bit less interesting.
We did play multiple games back to back because it’s quick and easy. But after a few plays, it also felt like we had kind of seen what it does.
Our Thoughts
For us, Gangs of Kyoto is a light filler that does what it sets out to do, without trying to be more than that.
The main thing it has going for it is how scoring works. When one player goes over the limit, everyone else benefits. That creates those small shifts where things suddenly go your way, even if you weren’t expecting it.
At the same time, it doesn’t feel particularly new. The core ideas are familiar, and even with the special cards, the game stays very close to that same loop. The special cards add variety, but mostly in a “more of the same” kind of way. They give you small tools to react to what’s going on, rather than changing how you play.
It can also feel a bit uneven at times. A single card can suddenly end a round, and sometimes that lines up perfectly for one player without much build-up. That’s part of how the game works, but I can see some people not liking that.
For us, it works best with more players. That’s where it feels like it comes together.
So yeah. It’s enjoyable, it looks nice, it’s easy to bring out. But I don’t know if it’s one we’ll keep coming back to a lot. It’s more of a “play it when it fits” kind of game.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Geronimo Games.
