2012: Tentacle Bento

It occurs to me that I haven’t yet written about Tentacle Bento, a card game I picked up at PAX but have only recently had the opportunity to try for the first time.

Tentacle Bento is a fairly simple game whose concept made the Outrage Brigade piss their collective pants a while back, which these days, to be honest, is enough to make me want to check anything out. Essentially, it’s an anime-inspired (all right, hentai-inspired) game in which you and your friends take on the role of ill-defined tentacle monsters of some description, and your task is to sneak into the all-girls’ school Takoashi University and “capture” as many nubile young ladies as you possibly can before the end of term.

Lewd premise aside, Tentacle Bento is actually a pretty fun game. It’s largely based around playing sets of cards — known as “captures” in the game — in order to score points at the end. In order to play a capture, you have to play a location, a capture event and a character at the same time. Playing a location, capture event and character of two or more different suits is a “sloppy capture” and allows you to get something on the table, but only lets you capture one girl at a time. Playing a complete capture of the same suit, however, is a “noble capture” and allows you to capture up to three girls at the same time. It also allows you to add extra girls of the same suit to a capture from your hand once you’ve put it on the table, up to a maximum of three girls per capture.

Alongside the basic location, capture event and character cards are a few special types of cards. All-Star cards can only be captured through a noble capture — and, moreover, can be the only girl in that capture. They have specific special effects once they’re played; normally a noble capture has a special “mayhem” effect (ranging from changing the direction of play to passing cards around the table) according to the suit it was, but All-Stars override and replace this effect.

Special character cards, meanwhile, have (usually negative) effects to play on other players. Some prevent players from playing certain types of captures, others need to be dismissed via meeting a particular condition, and some can be passed around. Several of them complement and interact with one another nicely, making for some enjoyable moment-to-moment strategy.

Finally, Event cards occur immediately when someone draws them on their turn. These have immediate — and often game-changing — effects. They also act as the game’s timer — once the fourth Event card comes up, the game is over, and players score points according to the captures they have on the table, and lose points for the girls and All-Stars they still have in their hand.

It’s a pretty simple game to get to grips with, and there’s a fair amount of randomness involved — particularly with the events — so it’s not especially deep, all told, but it is a whole lot of fun, primarily for the impromptu mini-narratives that the capture combinations inspire. Once capture might see three girls having a wardrobe malfunction in the headmaster’s office; another might see a lone girl attempting to have a cuddle party by herself on the school racetrack; another still might see two girls having a pillow fight in the nurse’s office.

Despite the morally questionable premise — if you know what tentacle monsters typically get up to, you know what I mean — the game is designed with good humour and wit. The cards all incorporate entertaining little snippets of flavour text, many of which are genuinely amusing both to people who recognise anime tropes and normies alike.

All in all, it’s very much a filler game rather than something you’d take particularly seriously, but I like it a whole lot and am looking forward to giving it another shot at some point in the near future. I was surprised how much my regular gaming group — most of whom aren’t particularly involved in anime culture — took to the game, so hopefully it will hit the table again soon.