Deep Sea Adventure studio’s latest game Scout is out next month

Japanese tabletop studio Oink Games, the microgame publisher behind Deep Sea Adventure, A Fake Artist Goes to New York and more, has announced its latest title will release next month.

Scout is a remake of designer Kei Kajino’s game of the same name - albeit with an exclamation mark at the end - first released in 2019. In the 20-minute game, players play consecutive runs or matching sets of adjacent cards in their hand, which have different values at each end - players choose which way up to use their hand at the beginning of the game, and cannot rearrange the order of their cards.

The set must be greater than the set already on the table - either in the number of cards or their value - in order to capture the previous set and claim it for points. If a player can’t beat the previous set, they ‘scout’ to add a single card from the set on the table to their hand, giving the player of the set a victory point but helping the scouting player to create sets and runs for future turns.

Oink Games’ re-release of Scout introduces a circus theme to the previously abstract original, with players now circus leaders looking to outperform their competitors’ shows and scout circus members from rival groups. The new edition also revamps the game’s artwork to match the theme, includes new scoring chips and adds a two-player variant to the original three to five-player rules.

The international edition of Scout will see a pre-release at German board game convention Essen Spiel, running from October 14th to 17th, the publisher announced, with a full release to follow in Europe at the end of 2021 before US availability early next year. The box - which matches the signature dinky proportions of Oink’s library - will cost 20€.

The new release will be exclusively available outside of Japan, the studio confirmed, aside from at specific events in the country.