Nobi Nobi TRPG Collector’s Box by Takashi Konno

I am trying to wean myself off of the bad habit of buying books and games via Kickstarter that I don’t subsequently have the time to read and/or play. One way to do this, ofc, is to stop buying things. But another way, more pleasing to my heart if tougher on my calendar, is to actually enjoy these things I’ve bought, whether by myself or in groups.

So when several of my local D&D regulars were unable to make it to the only date we could schedule to meet after a several month hiatus, I thought, “it’s finally time to give some of my other games a go!” I primarily wanted to try out the Nobi Nobi Tabletalk Role Playing Game because it’s lightweight, versatile, almost zero prep and, well, I’d been getting marketing emails letting me know that the expansion set is coming out soon, lol. How to decide whether I’m interested in buying the Cyberpunk and Steampunk expansions if I haven’t yet tried the original even?!

I also had another, slightly ulterior but definitely sneaky, motive for wanting to introduce Nobi Nobi to my RPG table. The game calls for the set of Game Masters and Main Characters to rotate from Scene to Scene. I wanted to use this quality to make players feel more comfortable telling stories, doing improv and being the focus, thereby fostering confidence and hopefully inspiring them to take more agency in the rest of our games going forward. Maybe one of them will even offer to GM a game soon! Stranger things, Horatio!

Anyway, I gave it a solo test run the night before to get a feel for the rules, minimal as they are. This game has been translated from the original Japanese by Don’t Panic Games, a French company: the translation itself is quite good but the rules do seem to be missing explanations for what some of the terms on the Character cards mean. This is, however, a handwave-y sort of game for people who just want to have a good time: when I played it with my table and we had questions about when we were allowed to use Character abilities, the consensus was ultimately “whenever it would seem helpful/cool.”

The solo test run went well. I randomly picked a Character card from the Magic box, then had my Priestess embark on a magical journey that wound up being an examination of faith, more or less (do all solo RPG sessions make me want to write stories? Yes. Do I ever have the time? Biiiiig lol.) More importantly, it gave me an idea of what I was working with and what I, as the person introducing the game to the group, felt were the best practices running the game for people who had even less experience with it than I did.

So I felt pretty confident bringing Nobi Nobi to game the next day. We had a party of five: four D&D regulars and the husband of our newest recruit. Two of us have played D&D forever, with me being cognizant enough of the rules to even DM on a semi-regular basis. The other three were still pretty new, but everyone was game to pick characters, pull cards, roll dice and tell stories.

Since there were five of us, I felt pretty confident in expanding our options by combining two of the themed decks for play. The Collector’s Box comes with Magic, Sword, Horror and Thriller (Mystery) genres. Unsurprisingly given our D&D priorities, we picked Magic and Sword to combine. I also followed the advice of this excellent review and moved the interval between GM and MC each time the GM card had gone around the table, so that people weren’t locked in to a single narrative pair.

Our game started pretty well, with everyone choosing their own Characters. I randomly grabbed the Seer because she was top of the stacks. FWIW, she is Hysterical to play. I did as much “I sense… [insert obvious thing here]” as I could get away with. The Introduction we drew was great: we were all at a Magic School where the Headmaster had gone missing, and had to find him in order to “win” the game (because you know someone at the table asked how we did that, lol. I added that we also won if we had a good time, which may have been a less compelling argument.) I had everyone describe and name their character, and say whether they were a student or staff or what have you, and was extremely impressed and gratified when the woman who’d grabbed the Aristocrat card said she was both a student AND the headmaster’s daughter. Plot hooks, we love them.

The first scene card tested my creativity skills as GM already tho, as pretty much all it says is that the MC has to walk a three-headed dog. So I told the Elemental Swordmage character that since he was so beloved by the Assistant Headmaster, he’d been called in to perform a special mission. His friends — the Seer, Aristocrat and Samurai. The Cook was busy cleaning up after dinner but would be folded into the narrative later — all came to help, and discovered that he’d been asked to walk the headmaster’s ferocious pooch. Hijinks ensued.

There’s definitely some creative stretching needed to link several of the scenes together. One GM drew a card, read it and said “Nope,” then put it at the bottom of the stack and drew another. And that’s perfectly okay! We modified Scene and Light and Darkness cards at will, keeping to the spirit if not the letter, in order to keep the momentum going in a story that worked for the table. That doesn’t mean that the final product lacked depth tho. While I did have to think extra hard about incorporating the Epilogue’s cooking competition into the story — and it sure helped that we had a Cook and had been collecting delicious demon tentacles from the dimension that kept trying to rip a portal into our own — we ultimately had a tale of the headmaster having been kidnapped by the hero of the demon realm he’d kept imprisoned in order to power his magic school. I told the heroes who won the cooking contest that the choice was either to let the demons live side by side with us and benefit from the school their energies had been used to power, or to allow them freedom to go forth and do whatever they want, free of the school. They chose the latter, making for a satisfying complete story.

The whole experience took us about two hours, partly because we were happy to embroider on our stories and partly because players’ kids kept running in and out of the play area to ask for things. It was a nice, light roleplay experience that gave everyone plenty of chance for heroics and cooperation tho. It definitely lives up to the name, as Nobi is slang for Novice in Japanese. The game has just the right level of storytelling and crunch for people new to RPGs, tho probably requires at least a little improv experience to be able to credibly stitch one scene on to another. I’m absolutely planning on getting the expansion now, even if it is in euros and who effing knows what the currency exchange rates are going to be like. We’ll have to see, but I can attest to the base game, at least, being well worth the price!

Nobi Nobi TRPG Collector’s Box by Takashi Konno was published September 2025 by Don’t Panic Games and is available from all good game sellers.