# Sakazuki *Created:* 2026-11-04, *Modified:* 2026-11-04 ![[Sakazuki (cover).jpg|600]] **Sakazuki** is a yakuza drama played in flashback, and the whole game is one room with too many men in it and a problem nobody wants to name first. It's for one to five players with no gamemaster, it runs on a deck of playing cards, and it costs you nothing but a bowl of tokens and an hour or two of collective nerve. It starts after the disaster, which is the right place to start. The family is gathered in the honbu — the family office — after a serious crisis. Rivals, police, internal betrayal, missing money, violence, shame that can't stay hidden: the scenario opens with the matter already on the table, and then the game runs backwards, each player's flashback assembling the version of events that got everyone here. By the end, the flashbacks are the story, and the family has to decide what it will tell the oyabun. Peter Scholtz wrote, designed, and drew the whole thing, and it's twenty pages of very tight work: rules, character and scenario sheets, a 52-card prompt sheet, a glossary, and solo rules, with nothing in it that isn't load-bearing. ## Setting The setting is a single institutional room and everything it has swallowed. A yakuza family, its ranks, its debts, its younger brothers, and its habit of solving problems by making someone personally responsible for them. The book doesn't waste pages on Japan-as-scenery; it gets its texture from the vocabulary — *oyabun*, *shatei*, *giri*, *kejime*, *yubitsume* — and from what those words imply about how a family handles shame. There's a glossary at the back for exactly that reason, and it's worth reading before play. Characters default to senior members: men who command younger brothers, give orders, and are important enough to speak in the honbu. The book says you *can* play lower ranks, and warns that it changes the balance of power around the table — which is a polite way of saying the game is about who gets listened to. The scenarios are bare skeletons with teeth. Each one opens with an address to the family — *The Informant* is the one in the book, with police raids that shouldn't have been possible, a seized ledger, a burner phone, and a detective who suddenly knows where to look — then gives you nine Scenario Aspects: people, places, debts, objects, and the dangerous names attached to them. There is no solution written anywhere. The book is explicit that you should not decide what really happened before play. ## Mechanics No dice at all. Each turn draws two cards and turns them into a flashback. The **Prompt Card** gives you one of 52 personal questions off the prompt sheet. The **Stake Card** gives you the shape of the answer: its value names the Aspect the flashback has to involve — a number from two to ten pulls the matching Scenario Aspect, while a Jack is your Feature, Queen your Bond, King your Relation, and Ace your Need. Its suit decides where your token goes afterwards. You have to connect the two, clearly, and the book asks for a full scene rather than a shrug: where it happened, who was there, what was said, what changed. Characters are four **Personal Aspects** and nothing else. Feature is the detail people remember when you walk in — a scar, a gold watch, a calm voice before bloodshed. Bond is someone outside the family you can't cut away from. Relation is a shared memory with the player on your left, written without asking them first and worth more the more it hurts. Need is the private hunger big enough to walk yourself and everyone else into danger. ### The Three Accounts After the flashback, your token goes into one of three bowls: **Blood**, **Oath**, or **Tribute** — violence, loyalty, and obligation, the family's three ways of owing. Tokens are personal, and everybody can see whose are piling up. A face card or Ace on the Stake Card forces a **Check Card**, and its suit decides which account gets audited: clubs check Oath, spades check Tribute, diamonds check Blood. Hearts check nothing — instead the active player may quietly pull one token out of any bowl, which is the game's small mercy and reads exactly like a favour being called in. ### Take the Blame When a checked account holds four or more tokens, someone has to answer for it. The character with the most tokens in that bowl **Takes the Blame** — ties settled by agreement or by drawing lots — and their player crosses out one uncrossed Personal Aspect. That's **Yubitsume**, and which Aspect you sacrifice decides what kind of penance it is. Crossing Feature or Need is *shini-yubi*, the dead finger: you pay for your own failure, in reputation or in ambition. Crossing Bond or Relation is *iki-yubi*, the living finger: you take responsibility for someone else, or you cut a connection to settle the matter. A crossed Aspect doesn't leave the story. It gets damaged, exposed, or made dangerous, and the player describes how the sacrifice helps settle the account. This is the engine of the game — you are spending the parts of your character that the cards keep pulling on, and every scene you survive makes the next one cost more. ### Acts and the Ending Play runs in **Acts**, with two recommended for two or three players and three or four for a larger table. Each Act ends when the Story Deck is exhausted and reshuffled; then every bowl is checked in an order the Active Player Marker holder chooses. At the end of the final Act, the tokens left on each Character Sheet decide who leaves the family: five is **Hamon**, expulsion with a route back, and six or more is **Zetsuen**, permanent severance, which means that player needs a new character next time. Then the table has one last conversation, guided by three questions: what really happened, who takes responsibility, and how the family keeps this from causing more harm or shame. The book is clear that the answer needn't be fair and needn't reveal everything. Someone gets protected, someone gets blamed, and someone pays for more than they did. ### Solo Play The solo rules are the same loop with the pressure turned inward: you play each character in turn, drop the follow-up questions, and may draw four extra **Oracle Cards** per flashback to seed people, places, objects, and motives. You can speak the scenes, summarise them, or journal them. It works, and it works best as a written record — a family's account of itself, assembled after the fact. ## Supplements - **Sakazuki: Character Sheets** (2026) — the sheets on their own, for a table that would rather not photocopy the back of the rulebook. *In the library.* ## Editions - **Sakazuki** (2026) — 20 pages, written, designed, and illustrated by Peter Scholtz. *In the library.* ## References - [Sakazuki — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/578703/sakazuki) — the product page, with the publisher's own summary and file details.