Wouter & Ymke 
Every year, leaders from across the Mushroom Kingdom gather for a tournament, recruit Kinoko from different factions and try to put together the best team. Being individually strong isn’t everything here. What matters is getting the right group of mushroom fighters together. Whoever scores the most across the tournament gets to rule the kingdom for the next year. I’m not entirely sure this is a sensible form of government, but we’ll go with it.
That premise leads to Kinoko Kombat, a small card game from Nekuma Studio that will be at Spiel Essen 2026, booth 5K415. Most of the cards you want are sitting face down in front of somebody else. You know a little, learn more as cards are revealed, and then try to work out where the Kinoko you need might be hiding. Your reasoning might get you exactly the card you were looking for. Or you confidently pick one and discover that your mushroom-based logic wasn’t quite as solid as you thought.
👥 2-4 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 15 minutes
📝 Designer: Muneyuki Yokouchi
🎨 Artwork: Giovanna Guimares & Juanita Wijaya
🏢 Publisher: Nekuma Studio (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Kinoko Kombat is for two to four players, and a game lasts as many rounds as there are players. Each round starts from scratch, with everyone trying to assemble a five-card team. At the end of the round, those teams are compared and points are awarded, with your scores carrying over until the end of the game.
The Kinoko come in four colours, with each card also having a numerical rank. At the beginning of a round, you secretly choose one card from your hand as your Kinoko leader. You also place one card face down in the centre of the table. Your remaining cards become recruits, which you arrange face down in a row from lowest to highest rank. If several cards have the same rank, you can decide their order yourself. You can look at your own cards whenever you like, but everyone else only sees their colours and their positions within the row.
Starting with the first player, everyone then takes turns recruiting cards from other players. You choose a face-down recruit and place one of your mushroom tokens on it. With a normal mushroom token, that card is immediately turned face up. A revealed 5 somewhere in a row suddenly tells you more about the cards sitting on either side of it, while the colours on the card backs provide another clue. Gradually, those completely hidden rows become a little easier to read. You can’t take cards from your own row or choose one that has already been claimed.
You also have one spotted mushroom token. A card claimed with this stays face down until the teams are compared, so you get to recruit it without showing everyone else what you’ve taken. Each player gets four recruitment turns, and on your fourth turn you can take one of the centre Kinoko instead of choosing from another player’s row. There is one extra detail here: if you use your spotted mushroom on that fourth turn, your star tile is flipped face down, which can matter if your final combination is tied with someone else’s.
After everyone has recruited four cards, all unclaimed recruits are removed. Your four recruited Kinoko join your hidden leader to make a team of five. You then form the strongest combination possible from those cards. The list will be familiar to anyone who has played poker: pair, two pair, three of a kind, full house, four of a kind and straight, plus a four-card mini straight. If none of those are possible, you have a single. Combinations are divided into tiers, and ties within a tier are first decided by the stars on your cards and star tile. If that’s still tied, seating order relative to the first player settles it.
First place scores according to the combination they made, and in games with three or four players, second place scores as well. Everything is then shuffled for the next round and the first player marker moves clockwise. Once you’ve played as many rounds as there are players, the person with the highest total score wins. The two-player version works a little differently. Four neutral centre Kinoko, one of each colour, can be recruited on any turn, and the two recruit rows are paired so that taking one card locks the card opposite it. Only the stronger team scores each round, and after two rounds the game is over.
Artwork & Components
There are 32 Kinoko cards in the box, divided between red, green, yellow and purple, with ranks from 1 to 8. The full deck is used with four players, while lower player counts remove the higher ranks. The Kinoko themselves are illustrated as little mushroom warriors, with different weapons, shapes and outfits across the cards. They’re colourful and slightly ridiculous, which seems about right for a tournament deciding the fate of a mushroom kingdom.
The card backs clearly show their faction colour, which is important when the cards are lying face down. Once everyone’s rows are set up, you get blocks of red, green, yellow and purple around the table, slowly interrupted by face-up Kinoko as players start recruiting. The ranks are easy to pick out when cards are revealed as well. We also used the reference cards quite a bit during our first games, mostly to check exactly where the mini straight sat compared with everything else.
The wooden mushrooms are what caught our attention most. Each player has three regular mushroom tokens and one spotted mushroom, with holes cut into the latter so it’s immediately different. They’re chunky enough to handle comfortably, and there’s something amusing about watching the cards slowly disappear underneath a collection of wooden mushrooms. I mean, cubes would have done the job, but they wouldn’t have been nearly as appropriate.
There are also four star tiles, scoring tokens and a mushroom-shaped first player marker. It’s still mostly a card game, so the box isn’t overflowing with components. Once a round is underway, though, with mushroom warriors being revealed and wooden mushrooms scattered across the rows, the table certainly looks the part.
Our Experience
We got the hang of Kinoko Kombat pretty quickly, although our first round was considerably less informed than we thought it was. We knew the rows were sorted and that the colours gave us information, but initially we were mostly looking for cards that seemed useful for whatever combination we had in mind. Then someone revealed a card and another player immediately pointed out what that meant for two cards further along the same row. There was a short pause around the table followed by a collective, “Oh, right.” After that, we started looking at the rows differently. Not obsessively, though. We weren’t trying to work out every single card, either.
Our own starting cards turned out to be more useful than we first expected as well. Once they’re laid out as recruits, we can’t take them ourselves, but we’re still the only person who knows exactly what’s sitting there. More than once, somebody spent far too long studying one of our face-down cards while its owner already knew it wasn’t going to help them. Then came the difficult part: trying not to react when they finally chose it. We weren’t always successful. Apparently none of us has a future career in professional poker.
Plans also had a habit of deteriorating. We’d start looking for a straight, fail to find the rank we expected and suddenly two pairs didn’t look so bad anymore. One attempt at a full house slowly turned into three of a kind and a hope for the best.. Sometimes we’d worked out exactly what a card had to be. Other times we’d confidently flip something over at the end and discover we’d picked the other possibility.
The final reveals were probably the funniest part. Someone would turn over a team that was nothing like what the rest of us thought they were collecting, or a supposedly certain pick would turn out to be completely wrong. The spotted mushroom helped with that too. At first we mostly used it on whatever card we wanted to keep secret, but after a few rounds we started paying more attention to which card everybody else seemed to be waiting to see. Leaving that one face down was sometimes more tempting.
We strongly preferred playing with three and four players. There were more rows to look through, more cards disappearing before our turn came back around and more chances for someone else to reveal something that changed what we wanted. Four players does mean waiting a little longer between turns, but we were usually still watching the table. The two-player version is more controlled, and we liked the paired-card locking rule, but it felt more direct. For us, Kinoko Kombat was more entertaining when several people were poking around the same collection of mushrooms and getting in each other’s way.
Our Thoughts
The poker-style combinations make Kinoko Kombat look more familiar than it actually feels to play. Pair, two pair, full house and straight are mostly there to give you something recognisable to chase. You already know what you want, so there isn’t another scoring puzzle to learn on top of everything else. The combinations tell you what you’re looking for. Finding those cards is where most of the game sits.
Good deduction doesn’t remove the luck. It just gives you better odds. You’re using rank order, colours and everything that’s already been revealed to make a better choice, not necessarily to prove that one choice is correct. Honestly, we were fine with that. The game isn’t pretending that every hidden card can eventually be solved. But if you want deduction to always end with a definite answer, there will be rounds where Kinoko Kombat annoys you. Sometimes you’ve done as much as you can and still have to pick.
My main criticism is variety. Once we’d played a few times, we understood most of what the game was asking from us. Different deals change where everything is, and other players can certainly mess with what you’re trying to do, but your basic approach doesn’t change much. There aren’t player powers or additional systems waiting to change things later. That limits how often we’d want to play it in quick succession, and I wouldn’t go into it expecting a deduction game that keeps revealing new strategies after dozens of plays.
On the other hand, you don’t need to track every missing rank to have a chance. One person can be counting cards and considering what everyone else might be collecting, while somebody else is mainly trying to find the last rank for their full house. Both can still play at the same table. I think that makes Kinoko Kombat easier to bring out with families or groups where not everyone approaches these games in the same way. Everyone does need to be comfortable with the occasional uncertain pick, though.
So we came away positive on Kinoko Kombat, particularly at three and four players. What I like most is the slightly backwards idea at its centre: you know exactly what’s hiding in your own row, but those cards are for everybody else, while the Kinoko you actually need are sitting in front of your opponents. It won’t replace a heavier deduction game for us, and after several plays we don’t expect it to suddenly become something more complicated. It doesn’t really need to. We’d bring it out when we want something relatively short where we’re still watching what everyone else is doing, changing our minds and occasionally being very certain about the wrong mushroom. For us, those rounds have been good fun.
📝 We received a copy of Kinoko Kombat from Nekuma Studio.
Going to Spiel Essen ’26? You can find Kinoko Kombat at Nekuma Studio in Hall 5, booth K415.
You can also find all of our pre-Spiel ’26 coverage here.
