Wouter & Ymke 
In most card games, having useful cards in your hand is a good thing. In Jusayo, we’d often rather make somebody else play theirs. You ask another player for a card, watch what comes out of their hand, and try to remember it for later. Ask the wrong person, though, and you’re out of the round. You can also claim that someone can’t play at all, although getting that wrong isn’t exactly great for your own survival either.
Jusayo mixes card play, memory, deduction and a fair amount of uncertainty. It’s one of Korea Boardgames’ 2026 releases and will also be at Spiel Essen ’26 in October. The rules aren’t difficult, and rounds are generally quick. After a few games, though, we stopped looking at cards simply as numbers and colours. Suddenly, that pink 4 somebody played three turns ago mattered rather more than expected.
👥 3-5 players, ages 8+
⏳️ Playing time: 15 minutes
📝 Designer: Woojin Yang
🎨 Artwork: Ahn Hyo-Joo
🏢 Publisher: Korea Boardgames (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
At the start of a round, everyone receives a hand of colour cards, with the number depending on the player count. Some cards are left out face down. A meeple on the small central board indicates the current colour, and whoever has the tray takes the turn.
You have three options: play a card yourself, request one from somebody else, or call out a player because you think they can’t play. Any card played has to match the colour currently occupied by the meeple.
Playing from your own hand comes with one important restriction. You have to play your highest-numbered card of the current colour. If blue is current and you have a blue 2 and blue 6, the 6 has to go. Double-colour cards count as both colours, and playing one moves the meeple to the other colour shown on the card.
Instead, you can hold out the tray to another player and say “Jusayo”. If they have a playable card, they must play their highest matching one. If they don’t have the current colour, they say they can’t and you’re knocked out of the round. So asking someone else to do the work for you isn’t entirely without consequences.
A call-out reverses that. Choose somebody and bet that they can’t play. If you’re right, they’re knocked out. If they produce a valid card, you’re out instead. An eliminated player puts their cards face down and stops taking turns, while the meeple moves one space around the board in the direction of the arrow. Double-colour cards and eliminations can occasionally send that meeple travelling rather quickly. Poor little fellow gets his steps in.
The last player remaining wins the round and flips their victory card from its unbloomed side to the flower side if needed. They start the next round, and winning a second round wins the game.
Artwork & Components
Jusayo certainly doesn’t look serious. The box and cards are covered in blue, green, yellow and pink, together with smiling flower-like characters, squiggles and little geometric doodles. It reminded me a bit of stationery you’d find in a colourful Korean gift shop. That’s not a complaint. You’re spending much of the game politely asking people for things and then accusing them of not having them, so the cheerful appearance feels suitably at odds with what’s happening.
The small game board consists of four interlocking pieces, one for each colour. Their order is randomised during setup, and arrows around the centre show which way the meeple moves when somebody is knocked out. The board doesn’t take up much room, but the puzzle pieces are a nicer presence in the middle of the table than a simple colour reference would have been.
And then there’s the chunky white meeple. It has a smiling face, buttons and a blue top hat, because apparently moving between four coloured spaces requires formal attire. The cards follow the same playful style, with large numbers and colours that are easy to recognise. The box itself becomes the tray that’s passed around during play.
There are 32 colour cards, with 20 single-colour and 12 double-colour cards, plus five victory cards. Those have an unbloomed and flower side to track your first round win. Nothing here is particularly extravagant, but I suspect we’ll still remember the top-hatted meeple long after we’ve forgotten most of the individual cards.
Our Experience
Our first few rounds were pretty basic. We understood the three actions, but we weren’t really using the information they gave us. Someone had played blue earlier? Great, we remembered that. What we weren’t remembering was which blue card they’d played.
That changed after a couple of rounds. Once someone has been forced to play their highest card of a colour, the number tells you much more. If they have to produce that colour again later, you can start piecing together what might still be in their hand. We went from vaguely remembering colours to trying to reconstruct little sequences of cards. Not always successfully, I should add. My memory was apparently much better when nobody else at the table was checking it.
Our requests changed along with that. At first, asking somebody else was mostly a way to avoid playing our own cards. Later, we’d deliberately return to someone we’d already targeted, forcing out another high card if we thought they still had one. Sometimes we’d come back a few turns later and try again.
Of course, everyone else had watched exactly the same cards. More than once we exposed what we wanted, only for another player to use that information before the tray came back to us. There were also plenty of turns where we didn’t trust our memory enough to risk asking anyone. Playing our own card was safer, even if that meant showing everyone something about our hand instead.
Call-outs were where all this half-remembered information eventually got tested. Somebody’s previous cards would suggest they couldn’t possibly have another card of the current colour, and one of us would finally go for it. We weren’t nearly as good at this as we thought. More than once, someone confidently handed over the tray only to be shown a perfectly valid card. We also regularly disagreed about what had actually been played. Somebody would insist we’d already seen a particular card, while the rest of us had no memory of it whatsoever.
We mainly played with three and four players and preferred four. Three made individual hands easier to follow. With four, there was another possible target and more chance that someone else would use information before we could. We haven’t played at five, so I can’t judge that count. Player elimination didn’t bother us much because rounds usually finished soon afterwards, although an early exit can happen. Games stayed fairly short too, unless the round wins were nicely distributed and everyone kept us going.
Our Thoughts
You never really know enough in Jusayo. You might have a pretty good idea that someone can play a card, but there’s rarely a guarantee. Some cards aren’t used each round, double-colour cards interfere with assumptions, and the current colour keeps changing. We were usually working with a mixture of things we’d seen, things we remembered and things we were fairly sure we remembered.
That’s going to be too loose for some people. You can follow every card and reach a perfectly reasonable conclusion that turns out to be wrong because part of the information was never available. We didn’t mind. Being confidently wrong accounted for a fair amount of the fun at our table. If you want careful tracking to eventually give you a definite solution, Jusayo isn’t really that kind of deduction game.
There is a limit to how far it goes, though. After several games, we weren’t finding many new ways to approach the same problem. We’d learnt to pay attention to the numbers, target particular players and recognise when a call-out looked worth trying. Different cards and different people still change what happens, but we don’t expect another ten plays to reveal some entirely different way of approaching Jusayo. That’s probably our main criticism.
It also needs people to follow what’s happening. The colourful artwork and straightforward actions suggest something very casual, but someone who remembers the previous few turns has a considerable advantage over somebody who starts paying attention when the tray arrives. For families or groups who enjoy traditional card games, remembering what’s been played and taking a risk now and then, that shouldn’t be much of an issue. If everyone mainly wants to chat while a game happens somewhere in the background, I’d choose something else.
By our later games, we were paying considerably more attention to a discarded pink 4 than we ever expected to. Jusayo isn’t a deep strategy game, and we probably saw most of what it has to show us after several plays. That’s fine for us here. With four attentive players, we enjoyed trying to remember the right cards, watching someone confidently remember one that apparently never existed, and deciding when we knew enough to risk another request. We wouldn’t bring it out for an evening of serious deduction, but as a quick card game between larger games, we’d happily play it again.
📝 We received a copy of Jusayo from Korea Boardgames.
Going to Spiel Essen ’26? Jusayo will be available to try at Korea Boardgames’ stand. You can also find more games we’re checking out ahead of Essen here.
