8 minute read
Theater of the Mind
Theater of the Mind
LEVEL ONE GAME SHOP LEVELS UP WITH MUGEN GAMING AND KIRI-AI: THE DUEL
By Rachel Potucek
As someone who hasn’t played board games since Chutes and Ladders in grade school, it took me a while to catch on to something big.
The tabletop gaming industry is hot and getting hotter. While the rest of us weren’t looking, Dungeons & Dragons and Risk made room for a new wave of inclusive genre-busters: Queer power and romance (Thirsty Sword Lesbians), cozy quilts and cats (Calico), and scientifically-accurate ocean ecosystems (Oceans) are lighting up Kickstarter. Thousands of new games are released each year, and analyst agency Arizton forecasts the industry will nearly double by 2028.
Amid this boom, Mugen Gaming—a new game publisher founded by husband and wife duo Ai Namima-Davison and Shawn Davison, also founders of Level One Game Shop in Kansas City’s River Market— is making international waves for its first game Kiri-ai: The Duel, a two-player strategy card game set to release this month.
At this year’s Spiel Essen—the world’s largest board game convention at nearly 200,000 visitors per year—industry mag Dicebreaker named Kiri-ai one of the convention’s best games.
The Pitch sat down with Ai and Shawn of Mugen Gaming and Level One Game Shop to talk about their rise in the gaming scene and to play the sublimely strategic Kiri-ai.
The city’s game shop
By the mid-2010s, tabletop gaming held a strong footprint in Kansas City’s surrounding suburbs, but at that time, there were no game shops inside the city itself. Ai and Shawn wanted to see if the city could sustain one, so they started inviting people to play.
They launched weekly Meetup gaming nights at Opera House Coffee & Food Emporium in the River Market and quickly reached capacity, so they took the business plunge and rented a small 500-square-foot retail space in the River Market.
They started with a small game selection at the time—nothing in stock, everything on the shelves—that they jokingly said looked more like a museum than a game shop. Every time someone bought a game, Ai and Shawn bought two more.
They kept inviting people to play, and people kept coming, so they strung lights in the hallways outside their shop to set up more tables, and within a year, people squeezed around crowded tables to play. It kept growing.
In 2017, they took over the lease of a neighboring shop to launch their current location, a space six times larger than the one they held before.
They call their store Level One Game Shop in honor of newcomers to the world of gaming—a nod to the “level one” starting player in Dungeons & Dragons and other games.
“It’s where everyone starts,” says Ai. That inclusive mindset has been a driving force behind the community they’ve aimed to build in everything from their phrasing and marketing to their event formats. They flattened their event prizes so that new players, as well as seasoned pros, could win something, giving everyone the experience of a good game with good friends.
When the pandemic hit, Level One reorganized to reach people where they were—at home—and began offering local pickup and shipping.
Today, the shop is packed with hundreds of games in stock, organized by a larger team. Everything you see on the shelves is available online for order, and the store adds an average of two to three new games each week.
From retailers to publishers
Shawn and Ai’s publishing company, Mugen Gaming, started somewhat unexpectedly.
Ai was raised in Japan, and on a trip to visit her family for Christmas in 2019, Shawn and Ai stopped by the Tokyo Game Market, Japan’s leading gaming trade fair.
The Tokyo Game Market stands out in the international industry for not standing out. As the world’s largest show for independent game developers, it tends to be less commercial and more craft-oriented. Makers are more likely to bring their games to show and sell in small quantities.
“It has a ton of indie game makers, but the purchasing market is not as big—you have a lot of good designers but not a lot of people to sell to in that language,” says Shawn. “There are rows and rows of designers, but it’s hard for them to break into mass sales and distribution because there’s only a few companies who pick up titles.”
“We were just walking around, we were not thinking about publishing a game,” says Ai.
They stopped by game designer Kamibayashi’s table and played his new game Kiri-ai, which, at the time, was slated for just 200 copies in print.
“It’s so unique,” says Ai. “We sat down and we played it and [said to ourselves] ‘We’d like to have this game in the United States—why don’t we try to publish this?’”
Just as they began conversations, the pandemic hit, and life went on pause. Last year, they picked back up to launch Mugen Gaming and its first published game, Kiri-ai.
To bring a game from design to distribution is no small feat. With Kamibayashi’s artwork and game mechanisms as a foundation, Ai and Shawn brought their retail experience to create new packaging—including an Edo period-style cloth wallet tied with gold string—and polished the game rules, translated and rewrote the instructions, and sourced a manufacturer.
In a stroke of Kansas City gaming community kismet, Ai and Shawn connected locally with an employee of international gaming publisher Lucky Duck Games.
Lucky Duck offered to co-publish and handle international distribution and translation and wanted to spotlight Kiri-ai at their Essen booth.
For Ai and Shawn, it was a perfect match. They could merge their retail experience and relationships with an international co-publisher and its distribution relationships.
“[We knew] we’re only going to have one first game,” says Shawn. “And if they think we’re good enough to do that, then we’re gonna do that.”
In the crowded tabletop industry, marketing is the key to success: A lot of game designers launch on Kickstarter to leverage its built-in marketing amplifier, with the goal of building an audience that then drives a publisher to pick up the game and help drive sales. Shawn and Ai knew they had a trickier path ahead. Earlier in the year, they had taken Kiri-ai to game manufacturers at the GAMA Expo and picked up early reviews and interest, but they knew they were relatively unknown to the general public.
“We stood at the [demo] table for eight hours each day, especially Ai—she wore a traditional samurai outfit at the booth and demoed it for eight hours straight every day,” Shawn says. “That’s how we got a lot of hype and reviews.”
They noticed that people started stopping by the booth because they’d heard about Kiri-ai, or saw others playing at convention hotels after hours. Then Dicebreaker and French reviewer Rue du jeu called it one of Essen’s top games, adding more buzz.
Kiri-ai: The Duel
With just 16 cards, Kiri-ai: The Duel—which Kamibayashi originally named Don-ten no Kiri-ai (or “sword fight under the cloudy skies”), is a two-player card game that makes for a satisfyingly strategic duel.
It starts with the unfolding of the Edo-period wallet to pull your cards. The wallet’s inner folds reveal more artwork of swirling clouds, moonlight, and a scene poised for battle: Two samurai face each other on the cliff’s edge. Cloudy skies darken the night. The moon breaks through as they strike. This is Kiri-ai: The Duel
One card serves as a board, two cards as the players, and the rest are split to each player’s hand. Aside from a small instruction insert, the game is accessible in any language. Once you know how it’s played, you don’t need to read the cards to play.
With each round, you can invoke a lethal sword strike, suffer a blow, or make a graceful step just out of reach—if you’re lucky. If you’re hit, it’s just two strikes, and you’re out.
Players’ cards move forward and back along a straight duel line, reminiscent of fencing. A game can end in a few quick rounds or run up to 15 minutes, depending on your luck and how well you can read your opponent (or how well they can read you).
Cards come in and out of play each round, keeping you guessing about your opponent’s moves, and the game has advanced options to keep testing one another’s strategy.
With no heavy cardstock board, draw piles, meeples, or tokens, Kiri-ai feels like an impossibly agile feat compared to many popular games. The small wallet can fit in a pocket or purse better than a phone. Shawn and Ai say it’s great for travel—especially airplane tray tables.
With Kiri-ai launching this month, Ai and Shawn are hard at work talking to other retailers and demoing the game, one person at a time.
They also see potential in Kiri-ai for character packs, variant roles, and licensed versions for knights or Vikings (I’m hoping for a Jedi pack). They’re also planning to revisit the Tokyo Game Market this month and see Kamibayashi in person again.
Kiri-ai is available for pre-order in December, with broader distribution underway.
