You're all gorillas. You can't speak. But you have to somehow figure out who the poachers are and kill them before they kill you.

All you can do is say is "Oo oo!", point, beat your chest, or nod or shake your head. And this makes trying to work out who's on your team a silly and delightful experience. It's fast paced, makes for a lot of laughter, and watching people be gorillas is always going to brighten your day.

This game sold incredibly well at Tokyo Game Market, fall 2019, and shot its way to the top of the ranking on Yellow Submarine's list in store. I played it to get a feel for the game, and to see if it lived up to the hype. I feel like this game is a refreshing take on the classic Werewolf game and can easily be a party favorite— if you don't mind things getting loud!

If you've played the normal Werewolf, it's very similar. You have a Gorilla Master (GM) that narrates play and tells each role what to do at night. There's village gorillas that do very little, a seer gorilla, a guardian gorilla, a bonded pair of gorillas, a backstabbing gorilla, and the poachers (the enemy team). So you all close your eyes during the night phase, and each role plays its part in divining others' roles, protecting other players from the poachers, poaching, and sleeping. Then once you wake up, the chaos begins as everyone attempts to find out who the poachers are with just "Oo" sounds (ウホー in Japanese).

However, the interesting spin comes in at this point. Once you all vote to kill one of the players, during their final moments they suddenly gain the ability to use human speech, and can leave the gorilla pack with 2 words of up to 3 syllables each. Then the rest of the pack learns these and can use them throughout the rest of the game. Looking someone dead in the eye and screaming "村ウホー" ("Villager Oo-ooo") is pretty funny!

It's helpful if your dying gorillas leave you with words like villager, you, me and enemy, etc., but you can choose whatever you like. Our list ended up as this:

• ムラ Villager

• コロス Kill

• チガウ Wrong

• ウラナ Seer

• テキ Enemy

• オメェ You (little sh*t)

• シロ Do it / white

• オレハ I am

• ミカタ an ally

The great thing about the game is that once you know the gist, you can play really easily. If you speak enough Japanese to get by day to day then this can be played in mixed-language groups (the GM can easily tap you on the shoulder if you need to do something), or if you can make paste-ups of the roles on the cards you can play in English too.At times I found myself as a villager not having very much to do, and I didn't really know who to pick except right before the traitor killed me, so that's a little bit of a downside. But it was mostly made up for because watching everyone go bananas was really fun.

There are additional rules we didn't play that might be more complicated, but as a pick-up-and-play game for parties, this one is a great addition to your Japanese analogue game collection.