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After School Dice Club Author Launches Manga Based on Kaiju Board Game
posted on by Rafael Antonio Pineda
Shogakukan revealed on Thursday that manga creator Hirō Nakamichi will launch a manga based on Masato Uesugi and Noriaki Watanabe's Kaiju on the Earth: Vulcanus board game on Shogakukan's Sunday Webry website on December 24.
Uesugi was the game designer on the original game, and Watanabe was the director. In the board game, teams of up to three players take control of a Japanese government crisis team that is trying to deal with the destructive advance of a giant kaiju toward Tokyo. Players deal with evacuating citizens, responding to fires, deploying the JSDF, and researching the kaiju. Players are able to launch an attack on the kaiju to defeat them, but the more players research, the easier the kaiju is to defeat. Players must balance researching with managing the disaster, while also deciding the timing of when to directly respond against the kaiju.
Arclight and Drosselmeyer & Co. published the first game, Kaiju on the Earth: Vulcanus, in December 2019. The second game Kaiju on the Earth: Leviath launched in July 2020, and the third game Kaiju on the Earth: Yggdrasus launched in September 2021.
The manga centers on Aya, who moves and starts to attend an all-girls high school in Kyoto. Her first friend is her reserved classmate Miki. After school one day, the committee chairwoman Midori takes them both to an analogue game specialty shop called "Saikoro Club" (Dice Club). There, they start playing a German board game without thinking. Thus begins Aya and Miki's search for fun through the world of analog games.
The manga inspired a television anime that premiered in Japan in October 2019. Funimation streamed the anime as it aired in Japan, and it also streamed an English dub.
Source: Shogakukan
