Last Haiku (2022)

Then the dreams overtook me. I conversed with the thousand poets long dead, they who trod the roads weaving toward eternity and never returned. In the morning’s warm embrace, my limbs felt their old vigor and the undeniable desire to travel. To seize the horizon. To behold hidden wonders. To exhume the words that will give life to my LAST HAIKU.

Last Haiku is a one-player adventure card game with a dose of creative writing. You are the latest in a long line of poets feeling your age, and you know you are not long for this world. Yet you also feel the call of distant, uncanny, and wondrous places where you might seek the inspiration to write one last haiku to leave to the ages to inspire future generations of poets, who may themselves discover stranger, more distant places to spark the words of their own haiku.

This is a “Make-as-You-Play” game, which means that the game starts with a few index cards and a pen. Each game will add new cards, either maps of locations or haiku your poet composed. The rules provide all the guidance you need for creating new cards and selecting the game’s thematic elements, which makes every copy of Last Haiku an evolving, unique world. In addition, it means that each game inherits all components added or changed in the previous games. There is no limit to the places you can visit and the poetry you can compose.

Each turn of the game involves playing cards of the appropriate distance. If the card was created in a previous game, your poet travels deeper into the frontier. If you cannot play an existing card, you create a new site on a card and your poet is inspired to write a line of haiku, these lines recorded on a separate card. The game ends when you have written each of three lines forming your poet’s last haiku, and your score equals the total of the distances of the new sites visited. Each new site and your haiku then enter the deck permanently.

-description from designer

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