Wouter & Ymke 
Some spirits haunt houses. In Onryō: First Seal, the spirit in question has bigger plans. An Onryō has emerged from the underworld and is gathering the Yōkai that have awakened around her. If she collects enough of them, things aren’t going to end particularly well for the living. Three ninja clans have therefore been sent in to stop her. Their solution involves less fighting than you might expect. Instead, you’re trying to work out where the Onryō is heading and position the three ninjas so that eventually she has nowhere left to go.
Onryō: First Seal is a cooperative game for one to five players and a standalone prequel to Onryō: Seeking Solace. Everything here revolves around one fairly simple problem: can you surround the Onryō before she collects eight Yōkai? The game is currently on Kickstarter, with the campaign running until 8 October. Lemery Games is doing things a little differently here with a Pay What You Want pledge, so there isn’t a fixed price for the game. We’ll come back to the game itself first, and you can find the campaign details at the end of the review.
👥 1-5 players, ages 6+
⌛ Playing time: 15 minutes
📝 Designers: Krisztina Felmery, Tamas Leidal & Pierrot
🎨 Artwork: Lívia Varga
🏢 Publisher: Lemery Games (prototype copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
At the start of the game, the three ninjas take their positions on the board, with the Onryō starting in the centre. Nine Yōkai tokens are placed around the grid, with their locations randomly determined using numbers on the movement cards. Those tokens are what the Onryō is looking for. If she collects eight of the nine, you lose. If you manage to block her so that she can’t complete her required movement, you win together.
Your turn starts with choosing a movement card and showing it to the other players. They can tell you whether they think you should use it and explain their general plans. Nobody is allowed to show their own card or say exactly what’s printed on it. So, “I don’t think that’s a good idea” is perfectly fine. “I’ve got a card that moves her four spaces” isn’t. After everyone has had their say, you make the final choice. You can stick with the card you revealed or switch to your other card. Once you’ve switched, you can’t go back to the first one.
The card then tells you which of the three ninjas you may activate, how that ninja moves, and how far the Onryō will move afterwards. Ninja movement includes orthogonal and diagonal steps, moving two spaces orthogonally, an L-shaped move, and sometimes staying where you are. You normally have to complete the entire movement, so stopping halfway because you’ve spotted a lovely blocking position isn’t an option.
After that, the Onryō moves. She always heads orthogonally towards the nearest Yōkai, following the shortest available route around walls and ninjas. If two Yōkai are equally close, the players decide which one she targets. She can change direction while moving, but she can’t move backwards or visit the same space twice during that turn. You generally know where she wants to go. Where you’ve put your ninjas can change how she gets there.
When the Onryō reaches a Yōkai, she immediately stops and collects it. Any movement she had left is lost, and she can only collect one Yōkai during a turn. If she starts moving and becomes blocked before using her full movement value, the game ends immediately and the players win. Once everything has been resolved, you pass your remaining card to the next player and draw a new one, and play continues clockwise.
Solo play removes the discussion and simply gives you two cards to choose from each turn, with everything else staying the same. There’s also the optional Tatari module. With this included, collected Yōkai trigger additional effects before being discarded. These might move the Onryō, prevent one of the ninjas from moving on the next turn, or change the Yōkai on the board. It’s an extra complication rather than something you need for your first game.
Artwork & Components
Onryō doesn’t look quite as sinister as its story sounds. The board uses soft shades of pink, peach and purple, with a fairly minimal look that keeps most of the attention on the figures and Yōkai tokens. Against that you have dark blue Yōkai tokens and three ninjas in mint green, pale blue and pink. It’s quite a soft-looking game considering there’s a vengeful spirit floating around trying to ruin everyone’s day.
The Onryō is much larger than the three ninjas, with flowing robes and a sculpt that makes her look as though she’s floating above the board. The ninjas are all different too. One has the large hat and sword, another is caught in a much more energetic pose. Their different colours mean there’s never any confusion about which one a card refers to. They’re unpainted, and I actually like the pastel colours against the board.
The movement cards are mostly there to communicate information, which is probably the right choice. The clan symbols, movement diagrams and large Onryō movement numbers are easy to pick out without having to study the card. The Yōkai are chunky square wooden tokens with dark blue backs and a white spiral symbol. Turn them over when using Tatari and you’ll find more icons showing their effects.
There isn’t much here in terms of component count. You have the fabric board, four figures, movement cards and Yōkai tokens, and that’s basically the game. Our copy is a prototype, so some production details may still change.
Our Experience
We got the hang of Onryō pretty quickly. Our first game also showed that knowing the rules wasn’t quite enough. We started by moving the ninjas towards the Onryō because, well, she’s the problem. Getting closer seemed sensible. It didn’t take long before we realised that standing next to her wasn’t particularly useful if she could simply head off in another direction. We started paying more attention to where she wanted to go instead, putting ninjas in passages and using the walls and edges of the board to help us. Before long, we were basically three people discussing where best to park human roadblocks.
We were far too afraid of high Onryō movement values at first. Four spaces? No thanks, we’ll take the smaller number. Then she ended up one space away from a Yōkai and somebody pointed out the rather obvious thing we’d all missed: whether we gave her one movement or four, she was only going to move one space before collecting it. A few games later, we were sometimes deliberately giving her a Yōkai because we liked where she’d end up afterwards. There was usually a brief moment when somebody suggested this and everyone else looked at them as though they’d forgotten which side we were on. We even reached the point where a high movement value could be exactly what we wanted. If she had to move four spaces and could only manage two, we’d won.
Things didn’t always line up so nicely. Sometimes we knew exactly where a ninja needed to stand and neither card could get them there. Once or twice we spent far too long discussing a move before somebody noticed that the ninja couldn’t legally finish where we’d planned because the full movement had to be completed. The limited communication made these situations more entertaining. Nobody could just put their card on the table and solve everything together, so we ended up with suspiciously specific comments such as, “I’m not saying I can do something useful next turn, but perhaps don’t do that.” We disagreed fairly regularly too. Sometimes the active player listened. Sometimes they ignored everybody.
Player count didn’t make a huge difference to us because you’re always controlling the same three ninjas together. With more people there are simply more voices involved. Tatari changed our games much more noticeably. A ninja we expected to use could suddenly become unavailable, or the Onryō could end up somewhere we hadn’t prepared for. We preferred learning the standard game first. It gave us enough trouble on its own. Once we knew our way around that version, Tatari made our carefully prepared positions a little less dependable.
Our Thoughts
What I like most about Onryō is that there isn’t much separating you from the actual puzzle. There aren’t character powers to learn, piles of effects to remember or lots of exceptions to check. You look at the board and can usually see the immediate problem. The Onryō is heading there, this passage needs blocking, and somehow the blue ninja needs to end up on that square. We could explain what happens during a turn within a few minutes. Working out where those three ninjas should actually stand took us considerably longer.
The cards are also where our main criticism sits. Sometimes the move you want simply isn’t there. We had turns where none of our options felt particularly useful, including moments where we knew exactly where a ninja needed to go and neither card gave us any way of getting there. That can make a loss sting a bit. Games are fairly short, which certainly helped us here. Resetting after a close loss wasn’t much of a commitment.
I do wonder how long it will stay interesting for every group. The Yōkai begin in different places, the cards arrive in different combinations and the board develops differently each time. You’re still trying to surround the same figure on the same board. Tatari messes with that plan and makes things less predictable without fundamentally changing what you’re trying to do. If you want asymmetric characters, scenarios, progression or strategies that head in completely different directions from one game to the next, you won’t find those here. We didn’t particularly miss them. I can imagine some groups eventually feeling that they’ve seen enough variations of this particular problem.
I can see Onryō working particularly well with families and groups who like solving things together without wanting a long rules explanation first. The age recommendation is 6+, although younger children may need some help seeing how several positions connect. There’s enough here for more experienced players to argue over too, especially because you can’t simply show everyone what you’re holding. If card luck really bothers you, or you want every loss to feel completely within your control, I’d be more hesitant.
More than once, the Onryō slipped through a gap we’d almost managed to close and we simply set everything up again to see if we could do better.
📝 We received a prototype copy of Onryō: First Seal from Lemery Games.
Onryō: First Seal is currently being funded through Kickstarter, with the campaign ending on 8 October. Lemery Games is using a Pay What You Want pledge for the complete game rather than a fixed pledge price. The campaign currently lists March 2027 as the expected delivery date. You can find the full campaign, including shipping, VAT and pledge information, on Kickstarter.
