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weaselsblaugh · 3 years

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How To Not Suck At Koi-Koi (A Guide for Yakuza Players, But Maybe Others Too)

One of the biggest staples of the Yakuza series of video games is the presence of real gambling games, on which you can spend your hard-earned (in-game) money to potentially win chips/tags. There is a typical litany of Western-style games like Texas Hold'em and Blackjack, but there are also Eastern gambling games that are somewhat less easy to get the hang of, for a person who hasn't grown up around them. One of these is Koi-Koi, a two-player game played with hanafuda cards. In this guide, I hope to teach you how to not suck horribly at Koi-Koi. I am by no means an expert, although I can beat Expert-level AI players (in Yakuza games) the majority of the time.

If you are interested in learning The Ways of Koi-Koi and How to Play Like An Asshole, read on.

So What's The Setup?

Koi-Koi is played with two players, using one deck of hanafuda cards. The deck contains 48 cards, each with a picture of a flower, and sometimes an animal or a poetry ribbon on it as well. The deck is divided into twelve Months, each with its own specific flower tied to it, and each Month has 4 cards.

When you start Koi-Koi in a Yakuza game, you are given an array of options to pick from, such as your Wager (how many Tags each Point is worth - I'll get into that later), how many Months (rounds) the match will run for, whether to enable or disable the Viewing hands (you will want these On, for reasons I will explain later), and depending on the Yakuza game you're playing, various assistance options (I never play without these, they're just too darned handy).

For new players, I'd advise starting off against the Beginner opponent and setting your match length to just 3 months, so that you don't stand to lose too much if you're having trouble figuring it out. In Yakuza, the difficulty of your opponent affects how often they'll miss a strong move and pick something else, but also affects how high your wager can be, so if you want a lot of money really fast, you'll want Expert. This also comes with an interesting quirk that I'll get into.

How Do I Play This Thing, Anyway?

After deciding which player goes first (there's no real strategy to it, you just pick a card and hope it's better than the other guy's), the game is dealt. You get 8 cards, your opponent gets 8 cards, and the table gets 8 cards face-up.

As soon as it is your turn, check your hand for a match. What you're looking for is any one card of yours that matches the flower of a card on the table. The higher value cards can make it a bit unclear which cards match with them, so I'll tend to just cursor over every card in my hand and see if any of the stuff on the table highlights. If you found a match, cool! Pick whichever match looks the coolest, and you will have claimed both cards and set them aside into your yaku piles.

Now, this is not the end of your turn, because immediately after playing a card from your hand, you get to draw a second one from the deck. If that card matches anything on the table, you get to claim those two as well! If it doesn't, it just goes on the table with the other ones.

Now your opponent gets to go through the same thing you did - they play a card, if it's a match they get to take both cards, they draw a card and do whatever with that, etc etc. Play will flip-flop until either both players are out of cards in their hand (a stalemate), or until one of you forms a yaku and chooses to Stop.

Stop: A Very Important Choice

Yes. This is where the fun begins in Koi-Koi: the eponymous Koi call.

If you've collected enough of a certain kind of card to form a yaku (say, at least 10 Junk cards), you will generally get the option to Call Koi. If you do not call Koi, game ends and you claim the amount of points that yaku is worth. But half the fun of the game is calling Koi to potentially form MORE yaku, when it becomes your turn again. The key to knowing when it's safe to call Koi and when you need to Stop, is paying very, very close attention to what your opponent has played and what they can potentially have left. Because while piling yaku after yaku can be extremely satisfying... there's always that risk they can form a yaku of their own and totally nullify what you stood to gain from yours. And that's something you can leverage as well. If your opponent scored some ridiculous hand like Rainy Four Lights and just called Koi, you can still win by getting literally any other hand.

What Hands Do I Go For?

That's really down to what cards are on the table. However the biggest-scoring hands are going to be the ones that involve the Lights cards (including both of the Viewing hands), the Boar Deer Butterfly hand, and amassing a lot of the Poetry Ribbons. For best results, you'll want to try to get as many of them as you can in one round, because in most implementations, your earned points will double if you get at least 7 points' worth of hands.

The ones that you're most likely to see really early in the round, though, are the two Viewing hands (Moon Viewing and Cherry Blossom Viewing). These only need two cards each: the Moon (pampas) or the Curtain (cherry), and the Sake Cup (chrysanthemum). If you see the Sake Cup on the table and you can match it, take it as soon as you can. If it's in your hand and you can't match it with anything, do not put it on the table, as your opponent may be able to steal it. Steal the Moon or the Curtain as soon as you're able to (or hang on to them if they're in your hand), and you will have potentially defused an early-round loss, or even made it possible to win the round early yourself. In Yakuza games and most rule sets, the Viewing hands are worth 5 points each (that's a lot for such a fast hand), though some other versions (like Koi-Koi Japan on Steam) only give you 1 point for them.

How Do I Play Like An Asshole?

Well, here's the strategy that is specific to the Yakuza series - there is a quirk in the AI under specific circumstances that will cause them to get very greedy. If the game is set to Expert difficulty and the game length is 12 Months (this is ONLY TRUE OF 12 MONTHS, shorter games do not trigger this behavior!), the AI will suddenly call Koi in extremely risky circumstances. 2 cards left and they've just formed 4 Lights against you? They call Koi. Last card and they've got three different yaku? They call Koi. They're in the lead and it's the 12th round, and they just got a 1-point Junk hand? They call Koi. For some reason, the combination of Expert AI and the longest possible game length, drastically increases the odds that the AI will choose to call Koi, even in a situation in which they would have won anyway if they chose to Stop. This is highly exploitable. See, if they've called Koi, you get more chances to form yaku yourself, and forming a yaku against an opponent that has called Koi doubles your score for that round. It is entirely possible to rise from the ashes with a ridiculous 44-point hand, entirely because the Expert AI is too stupid to know when not to Koi.

And here's where you start to play like an asshole. You take the lead once, and then you stay there. Keep careful track of which cards have already been taken and which can potentially come up, and systematically deny the opponent of anything they can use to form a yaku. If they've got two of the blue poetry ribbons, go ahead and steal the third one, even if it doesn't form a hand for you. Steal cards from the table that you can't even use, solely to deny them something they potentially can. And if they've threatened you with a yaku, form the easiest hand you can manage (even something like 10 junks) and then Stop. Once you're in the lead from doing this, never call Koi ever again. Ensure that you are always the first one to play, and ensure that they never get the chance.

Making Beaucoup Bucks From It All

And here's the other part of what Expert mode can do for you. Koi-Koi wagering works by valuing each point as the amount of tags you set in the Options as your Wager, and at the end of the game, you earn tags proportional to how many more points you have than the opponent. If you're on Beginner difficulty, your wagers can only be 10 tags or 30 tags per point, and the amounts available get higher depending on the AI difficulty you pick. On Expert, your choices are 200 tags per point, or 400 tags per point. For this reason, I believe you're required to hold at least 2,000 tags before the game will even let you pick Expert mode (at least, it was that way in Y7).

Consider, though, that racking up enough of a lead over 12 rounds can very, very easily multiply your investment 10 or 20 times over. Granted, outside of Yakuza 0, you won't be making _money_ directly from it, and you'll need to go exchange your tags for things you can sell. But the majority of the time, this is also a very good way to score unique equipment out of the prize redemption menu, and even if you're just buying Gold/Platinum Plates with your winnings, that'll still generally net you a few million yen in little time (useful in Y7 and Judgment where money is a bit harder to come by for a while).

I hope this has been helpful enough to those who have kinda figured out the game, but have a hard time winning at it!

#yakuza #koi-koi #ryu ga gotoku #strategy guides

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