2019 high school story, 4-koma manga adaptation in 12 episodes:
AniDB. Miki is terminally shy, but
learns to make friends through an interest in boardgames. vt After
School Dice Club.
One can see the seams in the storytelling here, and it's
interesting to pick at them. Slice-of-life about a shy schoolgirl
coming out of her shell a bit is quite a standard template, and for
this series – and presumably the original manga – it's been jammed up
against boardgames which are an increasingly popular thing in Japan
(usually, I gather, referred to as "analogue games", since "game"
there typically means something computerised) as well as in the rest
of the world. But at least someone involved with the manga or the
series knows something about modern games too: two of the group of
friends have ambitions to be published game designers and are working
on projects of their own, and every visible game box (some scenes take
place in a games shop, so that's quite a few) is from a real game.
On one hand the rhetoric about how games bring people together and
help them to make friends would be the same in a story about learning
to rebuild motorcycles, or to do embroidery. On the other, the games
that are put in the foreground are linked to the plot of that episode,
and some of them are pretty obscure. It's an odd dissonance which
reminded me of just how formula-bound some genres are.
Most episodes describe a game in some detail, usually giving a rules
explanation.
Marrakech
Cockroach
Poker
Incan Gold (more usually
Diamant)
6 Nimmt!
GOITA
One Room (prototype game)
Monjirō and
The Island (more usually Survive: Escape from
Atlantis!)
Keltis
Elfenland and
the children's game Daruma-san ga koronda.
Blokus and
Ladies &
Gentlemen
One Room (prototype game)
Toddles-Bobbles
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