The Board Game That Outsmarts the Spirit
"Quite a lovely room you have here."
"…………."
"Lady Raysia? You are standing quite far away."
What on earth had I been thinking?
Raysia blamed her self of five minutes ago. All it had taken was a moment of anger, a single flare of stubborn pride, and she had personally invited a stranger into her room.
She might have managed a natural conversation once upon a time — but she wasn't even Synchronized with her spirits right now, and speaking with a human being was something she hadn't truly done in years. The Raysia of the past might have coped, but the Raysia of today couldn't even bring herself to look Kyle Byron properly in the face.
She wanted nothing more than to throw him out on the spot, but Raysia still possessed common sense. She was the one who had recklessly Synchronized with her spirits, recklessly lost a game, and recklessly rage-invited him inside in the first place — chasing him out now, after all that, would be a step beyond even the shame she had left.
And so the bizarre standoff simply continued.
Kyle sat in his chair with an air of perfect composure, while Raysia, hemmed in by her spirits, had retreated all the way into the corner of the room, where she busied herself pointlessly touching the wallpaper.
[Grrr?]
[Clip-clop.]
[Ding-a-ling.]
[Whooosh!]
[Nyaaaawn.]
The only consolation was that the Water Tiger and the Wind Horse were still lingering on Kyle's side of the room.
If Raysia called, they would come to her at once — she simply saw no reason to.
If anything, the fact that two of the spirits who had always adored her and affirmed her were still sitting by Kyle's side only served to reconfirm her own mistake.
How much time passed like that?
Kyle finally gave a wry smile and spoke again.
"It seems you're rather shy of strangers, my lady. You were so bold when you stepped out the door earlier."
"…………."
"Surely you're not sulking over what I said back then?"
"……………."
No. Absolutely not — was what she desperately wanted to believe.
Raysia refused to admit that she was petty enough to sulk over something so small…
"Hmm. Then how about this? You don't have to say a word. You need only sit across from me. How does that sound?"
…That much, she could manage.
When Kyle offered the compromise first, Raysia nodded inwardly.
At this point, the fastest way to get him out the door was simply to grant what he'd come for.
She already had a rough idea of why he was here anyway, so after several deep breaths, Raysia summoned her courage.
Of course, she couldn't meet his eyes. Head bowed low, and with her spirits' help, she made it into the chair opposite him.
But that seemed to be enough, because Kyle gave a soft smile.
"Thank you for being brave."
Oh, so you noticed. Then hurry up and say whatever you came here to say so you can leave.
"And so, my lady—"
Here it comes. Something predictable about coming down from the tower, or meeting my father, or facing reality — so hurry up and—
"How would you like to play a board game?"
"………Huh?"
"Ah, you finally answered. My purpose is exactly as you guessed. Just one game. What do you say?"
For a moment Raysia was thrown completely off balance, unable to read what Kyle Byron was thinking at all.
But thinking it over slowly, the offer wasn't a bad one for her either.
He was saying that instead of spouting annoying, predictable platitudes, he would quietly leave if she played a single board game with him. That much, she could indulge.
Except.
"……………."
"Ah — I take it Kylegalli doesn't appeal to you."
Of course it doesn't.
Maybe if she were Synchronized with her spirits, but right now she had no desire to slam her hands down on a table playing Kylegalli with a man she wasn't even Synchronized with and had known for less than ten minutes.
So Raysia silently hoped that Kyle Byron would simply back off.
Instead, Kyle pondered for a moment, then drew a deck of cards from his coat.
"The design… hmm, there are plenty of good subjects around."
"………?"
"One for the Water Tiger, one for the Wind Horse, one for the Fire Cat, one for the Lightning Sparrow…"
The cards he drew out were clean, blank stock. No geometric shapes printed on them like Kylegalli's, no suits or numbers like a deck of gambling cards — simply white, empty paper.
And onto that blank paper, Kyle began to draw without the slightest hesitation, pen moving freely.
Raysia lifted her head just a fraction to watch the cards taking shape.
"………Ah."
[Grrr?]
"That's right — it's you."
From nothing but a few simple strokes, a water spirit leapt off the card, brimming with life. Eight such cards in all.
Hand-drawn as they were, no two were exactly alike — but only the pose and composition differed slightly, and anyone could tell at a glance that they were water spirits.
[Clip-clop!]
"Naturally, I'll be drawing you too."
Wind spirits, fire spirits, lightning spirits.
Alongside the water spirits, Kyle rapidly sketched out the seven other types of spirits — eight types in all, eight cards each.
As Raysia let out a small gasp of admiration at his considerable artistic skill, Kyle selected one spirit card at a time and spread them out in front of them.
"If Kylegalli doesn't suit you, how does this game sound instead?"
"……………."
"It's not a vigorous game. And the rules are simple. Shall I explain?"
"…………."
Nod.
After a moment of hesitation, Raysia nodded. As long as it wasn't the kind of game that required touching each other, she could manage.
And that was precisely why Raysia never saw it —
the expression that crossed Kyle Byron's face at that exact moment.
There is a certain board game.
Like Halli Galli, it needs no bells and no board — a game you can play with nothing but sixty-four cards.
Where Halli Galli fuels competition through physical clash, this game has no physical element whatsoever. It is a game made entirely of psychological warfare.
A game whose name is, admittedly, a little… awkward.
Cockroach Poker.
In my opinion, the greatest party game after Halli Galli — and the game in which you can witness psychological warfare distilled to its absolute limit.
The only change I'd made was to paint spirits onto cards that should have featured cockroaches and assorted other vermin.
"It can be played with many people, but it works perfectly well with just the two of us. You can see the spirits on the cards, yes?"
"…………."
Nod.
The young lady simply nods in place of an answer.
She's been keeping her lips sealed ever since her sudden entrance and spirited little outburst — but one of this game's purposes is precisely to pry that mouth open.
After all, this is a game where you have to speak.
"The players divide the cards between them and look only at their own. Then you choose a card and pass it to your opponent, face down so they can't see it."
"…………?"
"And then you declare: 'This is a water spirit.'"
But the card I had passed her was the Wind Horse.
In other words — a lie.
"………."
"Then all you need to do, my lady, is decide whether this card truly is a water spirit or not, and answer."
"……………."
"Shall you try?"
If she kept her mouth shut even after this, I'd have to break out another board game entirely — but perhaps spirit-illustrated cards struck a chord, because Lady Raysia actually opened her mouth.
"………This is a water spirit."
"Then let's flip it over, shall we? Oh dear! It was a lie!"
"………………."
"No need to glare at me like that. In any case, you guessed wrong, so you place the card face up in front of you. Whoever places a card down then passes the next one. Repeat this, and if four cards of the same kind ever accumulate in front of you, you lose."
"……………."
"Ah — there's no victory condition, per se. Simply put, surviving to the very end is victory. Well? Would this game be acceptable to you?"
Nod.
After only a brief hesitation, Raysia finally nodded.
No reason to refuse, after all.
One look told me she was painfully shy around strangers, and someone like that could never play something like Halli Galli with a person she'd just met — friendly rivals aside. That was exactly why I'd swapped to Cockroach Poker, a game that works even between total strangers.
No possibility of physical contact. All she had to do was pass a card and utter a single line. A quiet, static game with no room for things to escalate.
…Or so it would appear.
The true flavor of Cockroach Poker can only be appreciated by playing it yourself.
Just how maddening this game can make a person.
Originally a game for larger groups, it has its own rules when played as a duo. First, ten of the sixty-four cards are removed at random, and the remaining fifty-four are split into two equal halves. That's the entire setup.
I placed my half of the deck before me, drew a card at random, and checked it.
"This is a wind spirit."
"……………."
With a smile, I slid the face-down card across to Raysia.
The young lady pondered for an instant —
"………This is not a wind spirit."
— and declared it a lie, no doubt still smarting from being deceived moments ago.
And the moment we flipped the card —
"……………."
"Oh dear. It was, in fact, a wind spirit."
Tremble, tremble.
Clutching the card that had turned out to be true, Raysia's hand shook for a while before she took a deep breath and set the wind spirit card down in front of her.
Then, wearing a slightly more battle-ready expression, she selected a card and placed it before me.
"………This is a fire spirit."
"This is not a fire spirit."
"……!!"
"Shall we check?"
After a brief flustered pause from Raysia — my answer had come without a flicker of hesitation — we flipped the card to reveal a lightning spirit.
Smiling as though this were the most natural thing in the world, I passed the card back to her.
"Normally it would be your turn again, but since this is your first game, let's take turns for now. This is a wind spirit."
I named the very same spirit as before — and this time, it was the truth, told without a shred of deceit.
Raysia deliberated over it deeply, and then —
"………This is not a wind spirit."
— as if to say that surely, surely, no one would claim the truth twice in a row with the same card.
She answered with the tone of someone stating an ironclad fact. But when the card flipped, her eyes went wide.
Naturally — it was another wind spirit card.
"How could you—!"
"I'm simply being honest with you, my lady."
"……………."
Right. Let's be blunt here: this is a game that is endlessly, hopelessly tilted in my favor.
Cockroach Poker… or rather, Spirit Poker now, I suppose. On the surface, Spirit Poker seems like pure psychology. Get your poker face right, master your acting, and you're set — or so people think.
It's not entirely wrong. But there's one element every bit as important as acting.
Building a pattern.
Because reading your opponent's mind is the whole of this game, the process of implanting an expectation — this player will do X — becomes enormously important.
He told the truth twice in a row before, so he'll do it again this time.
'It's the gambler's fallacy, really.'
Independent events don't care what came before. Five odds in a row at odd-or-even means nothing about the next roll — and yet people believe, without any basis, that an even must be due.
Spirit Poker is a game you win easily by luring your opponent into exactly that fallacy.
"This is a water spirit."
"………Right. It's a water spirit."
One truth told.
"This is… another water spirit."
"……Yes. That one's a water spirit too."
Two truths told.
"Hmm. This one is a lightning spirit."
"No. This is not a lightning spirit."
"Are you cheating me somehow? How are you reading everything I throw at you?"
"………I have my ways."
And the next one is a lie, without exception.
Not every round went this way, of course — but a substantial portion of them did. After all, Spirit Poker isn't a game that ends after one or two correct guesses.
Moreover, the cards I passed were as varied as I could make them. Even when they kept landing in front of me, no single type piled up quickly — she'd need many more correct calls to sink me.
And so, after long deliberations and long waits, the moment the clock passed ten minutes —
"……………Ah."
The cards stacked before me far outnumbered hers. Every type of spirit sat in my pile, the tallest being three wind spirits — one card away from elimination.
Raysia's pile, by contrast, was small. But her very first mistakes — the wind spirits she'd gotten wrong twice in a row at the start — had likewise climbed to three.
And now, it was my turn.
"This is a wind spirit."
"………!"
On the surface, the situation favored Raysia beyond question. All she had to do was be careful of wind spirit cards.
But if she called wrong this time, a fourth wind spirit would gather in front of me — and I might lose after all. The instant she realized it, Raysia's eyes filled with tension.
Was this card truly a wind spirit, as I claimed? Or wasn't it?
This single choice might decide the whole game. We each had three wind spirits piled up.
…And in the game immediately prior —
I had told the truth twice in a row, and Raysia had seen through it.
Which meant —
what choice would she make this turn?
"……………."
Her deliberation ran long. Having grasped that a smaller pile doesn't guarantee safety — that the types of cards mattered just as much — Raysia was careful to the point of agonizing.
She had long since lost herself in this simple, heart-pounding board game.
"………It's… yes."
"…………."
"This is a wind spirit… it is one."
After closing her eyes and holding an almost unnatural silence, Raysia finally gave her answer.
Unlike any of the routines I'd run until now —
she called it truth for the third time in a row.
And the card I had passed her was —
"A wind… spirit."
"Correct. And with that, I hold four wind spirits."
— indeed, a wind spirit.
Raysia had refused to trust the routine I'd spent the entire game implanting in her — and at the decisive moment, that refusal was what saved her.
It had been genuinely surprising, but it was possible, and so it happened.
"I won… I won…!!"
THUNK!
Having clawed her way to victory after ten grueling minutes of psychological warfare, Raysia was so swept up in the moment that she sprang out of her seat on the spot —
and I smiled at her.
"Congratulations. You won."
"…………Yes."
Only then realizing what she'd done, Raysia bowed her head and sank back into her chair.
And so the board game wound to a close — or so the atmosphere suggested.
"As promised, I'll now take my leave of the tower… that said."
"………?"
"Might I possibly play one more round of Spirit Poker?"
"Spirit… Poker?"
"That's this game's name. What do you say?"
Perhaps it was thanks to all that talking during Spirit Poker — but Raysia, who was no longer holding her silence or avoiding my gaze, stared at me for a moment.
She deliberated, and deliberated, and then gave a small nod.
"……If it's truly just one more game."
"Thank you, my lady."
She had nodded quietly —
which made it half a success.
Now all I had to do was win exactly once.
Watching how Lady Raysia approached the game, it was clear her standoffishness came purely from a lack of human contact — her competitive spirit itself was superb.
The plan was simple: show her the sight of someone beating her, let that winning drive take hold of her, and gradually widen the points of contact from there.
Except.
"This is a lightning spirit."
"Correct. Lightning spirit."
Hmm.
"This is… a water spirit."
"No. This is not a water spirit."
Uh.
"………This is a wind spir—"
"Correct."
"……………."
Next game.
Less than a minute into our second round of Spirit Poker, I was able to come to a conclusion.
Raysia, brimming with absolute certainty — reading my routines, my bluffs, my entire psychological playbook — was calling every single card without fail.
'…The hell is this?'
Right now.
…Something was very, very fishy here.