Publication date of the original Japanese article: 2021-07-26 10:15 (JST)
Translated by. Ari Clark

On July 24, Japanese game development team KPC released their game YamaFuda! 2nd Station. It’s available for PC (on Booth), and retails for 1000 yen (approx. $9 USD). It can display subtitles in English as well as Japanese.

[Update 2021/08/31 23:00 JST]
The Steam version of YamaFuda! 2nd Station has recently been announced. It will be released on September 25th.

YamaFuda!2nd Station is the sequel to YamaFuda!, a previous game that was first distributed at Comiket 97, held in December 2019.

YamaFuda! 2nd Station is a deck-building turn-based hiking card game where you use cards to climb a mountain. The protagonist, Koharu, has always been interested in hiking. One day, she looks at a faraway mountain and murmurs to herself, “It looks like it would be a great place to hike.” Her friend Hiyori heard Koharu’s remark and invited her to go hiking. The next day, with Hiyori by her side, all suited up, Koharu takes her first step into the world of mountain hiking.

The two girls must brave the ruggedness of the mountain that assails them on each turn, and advance toward their goal of reaching the summit. The game uses action cards to represent the actions taken by the protagonists. Each card has two set values, “Hike”, which shows how many meters of progress will be made in one turn, and “Care”, which helps the girls withstand the ruggedness of the mountain.

For example, in a turn where they’re assailed with 10 points of ruggedness, if they use the card “Staccato” which has 5 Care points, their HP will go down by 5 points. As you climb the mountains, you have to choose your actions carefully in response to the situation, to avoid running out of energy mid-hike and failing to finish the climb.

There are lots of different cards, including “Walk”, which gets stronger every time you successively use it, “Breath”, which protects you during the next turn, “Run”, which makes rapid progress, and “Eat”, which restores your HP by eating a banana.

You can put together all sorts of strategies, such as building your deck around the “Walk” card, which is a fairly basic card but develops stronger effects the more you successively use it, or focusing on defense with cards like “Heavily”, which has protective effects that carry over into the next turn. Every time you advance another 10% of the way up the mountain, you can choose a new card to add to your deck from a randomly displayed selection of cards. There are more than 10 mountains for you to climb.