JISOGI is a board game about running an anime studio. While it's clearly made with a lot of love for shows from Shōnen to Shōjo, it takes a decidedly, and deservedly, jaded look at the crunch and the extreme pressure that's placed on artists, writers, producers, and directors to keep the Japanese animation industry afloat. Its title, "JISOGI", is derived from an expression about how keeping a business going is like riding a bicycle, because the wheels need to constantly be kept spinning to prevent everything from collapsing.
Mechanically, JISOGI is a worker placement game that is designed to be difficult to simulate how tricky it is to keep a small business afloat. Because of this, taking on debt and tightly balancing incoming and expenditure is an essential part of the experience. There's even an optional "Despair variant" on Board Game Geek that makes repaying loans more debilitating.
When the game begins, the morale of all of the staff at each players' company is at rock bottom. Because of this, all of the workers that players have access to at the beginning of the game are labelled "Dead-Inside" and are only able to undertake a very limited number of actions. If players are able to pull their company out of debt, they can gradually improve working conditions and promote and motivate their staff in order to unlock additional and better quality actions.
All of the shows that players will be designing are made by combining three script parts: a setting, a plot, and a twist. You might have a show set in a high school, where everyone is learning martial arts, as part of a scheme enacted by a sinister AI. Each of these elements affects the genre of your show, and if you're able to ensure that you put out programs in genres that are currently trending, you'll be able to make more popular shows that will give you the funds to keep the lights on and to chase the debtors from your door.
JISOGI offers a gritty take on worker placement that strips away the layers of power fantasy that sometimes pervade the genre, and instead examines the difficulty of trying to do creative work in a cutthroat corporate world. A revised 1.5 edition of the game is currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter. The campaign will last until the beginning of March.
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