Hitoya is a two player abstract card game where players take turns claiming and capturing tiles on a four by four grid. Each player gets a hand of character cards which represent key players in the "Amelio Tale." These cards provide tiles and special power tokens for placement on the board.
Tiles denote a number or symbol on each side. When a tile is first placed on the grid it automatically attacks all of its neighbors (if the number/symbol is greater on the attacking tile, the attack is successful). Some tiles are considered "scoring" and the majority of the game revolves around capturing and recapturing them.
There are only 15 spaces on the grid to lay tiles so games are typically fairly short (10-15 minutes). The first edition of the game includes four power types (Life, Death, Chaos, and Rotate) and twenty unique characters.