Game Gatherings: Undo, Cherry Blossom Festival
At our most recent book club, we read a time-loop mystery set in Japan. This seemed like the perfect group of armchair detectives with whom to play Undo, Weaving Fate Anew!
This game series, created by Pegasus Spiele, tasks players with uncovering clues and manipulating events in the past to change the present.
The game Cherry Blossom Festival takes place in Japan, and the players work to save a man’s life.
You can choose which key points in the past to travel to and must interpret the few facts you know as you make decisions about what events on the timeline to alter.
You must gather the clues and discuss the possible meanings as a group before deciding what option to take. The choices you make throughout the game add up toward your success or failure in saving the victim.
We were eager to dive in and sleuth!
Official Description:
Okayama, Japan, March 2000: A man in his sixties lies dead on the floor of his living room. Beside him are a broken wine glass and a picture of a young woman in a wheelchair. The deceased wears an old-fashioned blue suit. He shows no signs of injury, but there is an old scar, barely visible, above his eye. In his jacket, a phone rings, playing the melody of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, while a petal from the cherry twig on the nearby table circles to the ground. UNDO - Cherry Blossom Festival is not about reconstructing the progression of events or identifying a murderer. Instead, the players act as incorporeal Weavers of Fate who travel into the man’s past to undo his death. They decide together in which order they want to visit the different moments of the victim’s life. Every leap in time entails important decisions, which influence whether the man lives or dies. Will the players be able to change his fate and save him? Cherry Blossom Festival is one of three initial cases of the innovative new game series UNDO. As players travel through the dead man’s past and try to give him a future, they gradually explore a touching story about love, loss and family.
The book club had a fantastic TIME playing this game!
Even if it hadn’t fit this month’s read so perfectly thematically, we still would have enjoyed this game. The bulk of gameplay revolves around talking through possible meanings of clues and about what the significance of each choice will be on the deadly outcome.
While you can really only play this story once (because you know the final answer), your group’s decisions of when to travel to and what to alter make the path you follow unique to you.
The fun comes from analyzing potential clues as a group and guessing what ultimately leads to the death. Our group already loves talking about mystery books and our reading/sleuthing experiences, so it was a natural extension to test our skills with the story cards.
Any group that enjoys talking through scenarios and analyzing (fictional) possible murders should enjoy this game.
We succeeded in saving the man’s life! As a clue-collector time-traveler, can you do the same?
