Naishi Is a Good Card Game with a Deeply Misguided Theme

By Keith Law | September 24, 2025 | 1:30pm

Tabletop Reviews board games

Naishi Is a Good Card Game with a Deeply Misguided Theme

Naishi looks like another capture-the-flag two-player game when it’s set up, but don’t be fooled: it’s a tight tableau-builder where you’re just fighting to draft cards from the center row as you each try to get the most valuable set of ten cards, with only half of them visible to your opponent. It’s a solid game that shows some clear effort by the designers to keep it balanced even with some wide variance in how the cards score, but it’s held back by a theme that not only doesn’t fit the mechanics but continues a bad trend in the hobby.

In Naishi, you start with 10 mountain cards, five in your hand and five in your “line.” On your turn, you select one card from either your hand or line, discard it, and then take the card in the same position in the center row to replace it, playing that card face-up. If it goes into your line, it remains visible to your opponent, but if it’s in your hand, it’s hidden. You may also use one of your emissary tokens to take a bonus action, swapping the positions of two cards in your tableau, doing the same with two cards in the center, or discarding the top cards from two central piles. Or you may use the permanent emissary action that is available just once per game—if one player uses it, they lose that emissary token for the rest of the game, and the other player can’t use the action—which allows them to swap a card from their tableau with the card in the mirrored position in the opponent’s tableau. That’s the only way you can ever take a card from your opponent in Naishi.

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The game ends when two of the center row’s draw piles are empty, or if one pile is empty and one player declares the end of the game, after which the other player gets a final turn.

There are 12 card types in Naishi, including mountains, and they each score differently. Mountains are the starting cards; if you have two or more left when the game ends, you lose five points, but if you have exactly one left, you get five points. The other card types score based on their positions, on what cards are adjacent, on how many different card types you have, or in other ways. There’s also a Ninja card, which has no inherent value, but at game-end if you have a Ninja in your tableau, you can pick another character card (not a place card) you have and treat the Ninja as a copy.

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The clever part of Naishi is the way it forces you to consider placement within your tableau while also limiting how much you can rearrange those cards. You get just two emissary tokens, and when you place them on the spaces that allow you to swap two of your cards, they stay there until you use an entire turn to recall them, which means you’re not taking a card on that turn—and perhaps give your opponent two straight turns to select cards. Early in the game, this isn’t a big problem, because you still have mostly mountain cards, but later on, when you have more valuable cards and have at least some of them placed where you want them, you can end up having to choose between giving your opponent a card they need and messing up your carefully crafted tableau.

Having cards with different scoring methods isn’t novel, but the cards in Naishi do score in some interesting ways. Rice paddies and torii (Japanese gates) require that you have at least two to score, with the rice cards also only scoring if they’re adjacent—up to 30 points if you get four in a row. The namesake Naishi cards only score if they’re in the middle (third) position in one of your lines, 12 points if they’re in the front line and eight in the back. There are cards that only score on an edge, cards that must be next to other cards, cards that only score if they’re in your hand, and so on. The icons on the cards don’t include any text, but I find them pretty clear in explaining how the cards score.

Naishi is, unfortunately, yet another example of European designers and artists appropriating Japanese culture as the theme for a game. I doubt any one culture has seen this more than Japan’s has. Some of my favorite games fall into this category, including Tokaido, Takenoko, and Samurai, taking Japanese imagery and language and pasting them on to an unrelated game. In the case of Naishi, the name refers to several offices for court ladies from the Nara and Heian periods in Japan, such as the naishi no kami, whose main career path was often becoming consorts or concubines to the emperor, something that the game ignores entirely in its text and game play. There are games that do a somewhat better job of this—The White Castle comes to mind as a game that at least ties the theme well to the mechanics—but it’s just overdone at this point, in a time when we have many great titles set in Japan that come from Japanese designers, including Hanamikoji, Iki, and the Yokohama games.

Naishi is an above-average game—sorry, my baseball brain can’t help but think of everything in terms of above/below average and so forth—that plays out very differently from game to game based on how and when cards appear. The scoring shouldn’t be this balanced, but it is, and I’ve found there are many paths to victory (and defeat). I couldn’t quite get past the theme, especially the way it ignores the roles of these real-life women and turns them into fodder for points. Perhaps it’ll get another theme at some point that doesn’t borrow from another culture; the underlying game is more than good enough to earn a place on the shelf.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.