Kabuto Sumo and Expansions
review by Brendan
Hello! Do you like bugs, wrestling, and hero battle games? If so, Kabuto Sumo is the game for you! It's also great for kids or for roping in less experienced board game players, as Kabuto Sumo has a built-in Junior option that simplifies the gameplay experience. Kabuto Sumo is a two to four player game where everyone picks their own unique wrestler beetle, each with their own abilities and special signature piece. These beetles all have a very distinct personality and are all based on different kinds of beetles, such as Mighty Jaw Mike, the stag beetle that can instantly delete anything and anyone trapped between his mandibles, or Sisyphus, the dung beetle that can smush together pieces to create an ever larger supply of pieces to plow onto the field.
What's the goal? Kabuto Sumo operates under the very simple basis of sumo, where you and your opponent are each doing your best to shove your opponent out of a circular arena. Unlike normal sumo however, Kabuto Sumo's arena is littered with coin-like discs, where you yourself must shove other pieces onto the arena from the sides to try and push everything in the arena closer to the edge. It's kind of like those arcade machines where you throw in coins to try and create an avalanche of coins falling off the slope, or vaguely similar to launching marbles to try and knock others away. At the start of the game, each player receives an inventory of discs to use, places their beetle onto the arena, and takes turns pushing in pieces from the sides. If a wrestler is knocked off, the game ends with the remaining wrestler(s) being victorious! If non-wrestler pieces are knocked off, the active player will steal them to add to their inventory. While one may prefer to go after the wrestlers hoping for a quick win, running out of pieces will result in a loss, so targeting a big stack or cluster of pieces can sometimes be a smarter tactic than just barreling towards your opponent.
With the basic rules out of the way, let's discuss the wrestlers themselves! There are eight unique wrestlers (five of which have a junior variant!), and as mentioned before, every wrestler has their own unique signature piece to use. These can be a small piece, such as The Pebble's Champion Belt, or a huge piece, such as Sisyphus's giant ball of dung! In the normal version of Kabuto Sumo, these must typically be earned through spending pieces from your inventory via a payment to an opponent or stacking them on top of another piece in the arena, and others are earned by engaging in risky play such as touching the edge of the arena. While these costs may sound steep, these pieces can offer significant advantages! For example, while The Pebble's Champion Belt may be small, it is a dangerous trap! The Champion Belt is placed on top of another piece, and once knocked off of the arena, The Pebble will immediately take another turn! This can be applied offensively with back to back turns caused by intentionally knocking it out yourself, or defensively by threatening your opponent with a counterattack if they attack from a certain angle that would shove off a precariously perched belt. Every wrestler has their own unique style of play, such as one who stacks pieces on top of their head to stock as ammo to allow a barrage of pieces on another turn, or one who replaces the generic wrestler piece with one huge wrestler piece to bully others with and specializing in throwing large pieces onto the arena to bash things around, so find your favorite or juggle them around to keep things fresh! In Junior play, you will instead start with your signature pieces by default, albeit without any abilities, being a contest of brute strength instead!
Kabuto Sumo also has two expansions available as well! Insect All-Stars is an expansion that doubles the roster from the base game, introducing eight new wrestlers (and five new junior variants!) with their own unique abilities and signature pieces. Unlike the base game, this roster includes non-beetles, such as Teddy R., the stick bug, and Mother Superior, the praying mantis! These wrestlers can be a fair bit more experimental, such as wrestlers that can limit the types of pieces an opponent can play or the ability to forcefully exchange pieces with someone else. Altogether, they offer a lot of new styles of play to help vary matches and offer new matchups and strategies when played with and against wrestlers from the base game. This expansion is great for groups that regularly engage in the four player mode or just want to expand the roster!
Total Mayhem is an expansion that focuses on new objects to throw into your matches! These range from tiny caltrops to scatter atop the field, torches to rouse the crowd, and even a coffin meant to stash or gobble up loose items! There are eight new objects introduced in this expansion, each represented by a card with two sides! The Mayhem side is typically a modifier to the match that uses the object to shake up the game and even potentially add alt win conditions, such as a King of the Hill-esque torch race where you must try to shove your torch to the center of the field, or a whittle-em-down strategy with the caltrops where anyone who knocks out too many of the spiky obstacles will immediately lose the game! The other side of the card is the Item side, which has a cost or condition that anyone can meet to grab the object for themselves, such as a cash briefcase that can force opponents to exhaust their inventory, or the ability to trade in a small piece for a chair to smash into the arena! Alt win conditions from Mayhem cards don't replace the original win conditions, so you can still just knock out your opponents, but they do offer something to consider and can pair nicely with certain wrestler abilities. Item cards can be thought of as essentially a second Signature piece to earn, allowing you to branch out in diverse ways from your usual strategy or giving you an avenue to punish those who get distracted from their preferred gameplan.
All in all, Kabuto Sumo is a very easy to pick up and fun to play game. Pieces are solid and very distinct, which makes setup and cleanup very easy to perform, and it's great seeing how expressive and unique the different Signature pieces can be when the arena becomes a scrambled mess of discs and torches and dung. The Junior mode is pretty simple, but the basic gameplay of just shoving things around is pretty fun, and you can always jump into the normal mode after the less experienced players feel more comfortable with the game. The expansions offer a great amount of replay value and fun new stuff to the game as well, though I do think Total Mayhem offers more of a unique addition to the formula. The boxes themselves are pretty small as well and easy to store with the multiple baggies that they come with to store pieces, so it doesn't take up much space at all once put away despite the size of the assembled arena. If you want a quick, fun, and small competitive game where you the player are physically engaging with the board, Kabuto Sumo is the game for you!
Kabuto Sumo and its expansions are available now from our webstore.
