Mori

Mori Deep Dive

What the Community Thinks About Mori

Reviewers who have played Mori, the trick-taking game published by Allplay, mostly agree that it packs a lot of strategy into a small box. Dr. Brian McDonald of Brains On Games calls it one of the best card games played that year and one of their top five trick takers. In a later ranking McDonald places it sixth on their 2024 top ten list and calls it criminally underrated. McDonald is puzzled that its Board Game Geek rating sits at 6.7, and suspects the score does not reflect how good the game is.

The Broken Meeple takes a more measured line. Speaking about small games from the UK Games Expo, the reviewer calls Mori "mechanically one of the more interesting trick taking games" in the collection but argues that the rulebook, the reference card, and the box's stated playtime all work against new players. Where McDonald's praise is close to unqualified, The Broken Meeple frames Mori as a hidden gem that needs clearer presentation to reach its potential.

Daniel Newman, the designer, appears on Beyond Solitaire and describes Mori as one of the Allplay titles developed independently before being pitched to the publisher. The sharpest disagreement between reviewers concerns player count and pacing. McDonald says three players work, but four or five feel noticeably better because the higher-numbered cards carry more skulls and the rot cards become harder to track. The Broken Meeple argues that the game gets longer as more people join.

Core Mechanics That Define Mori

Trick-Taking With Must-Follow Exceptions

Mori is built on a standard trick-taking core. Players must follow the suit that was led when they can, and the highest card of the led suit takes the trick unless a trump is played. McDonald notes that the trump relationships work almost like rock, paper, scissors, with a fixed circle in which each suit beats one and loses to another. The Broken Meeple describes a different trump structure in the same game, where the seasons trump one another in sequence so that summer beats spring, autumn beats summer, and winter beats autumn. The Broken Meeple also reports that the rulebook explains this poorly.

What makes the trick-taking distinctive is that the rot cards and dice break the must-follow rule. A rot card played into a trick cannot win it, so a player can deliberately give away a card with leaves or skulls to shape the rest of the round. McDonald argues this gives Mori more hand management than most trick takers in their experience, because players must budget their cards and decide which ones to hold for later.

Dice Drafting as a Rule Breaker

Ten dice are rolled and placed on the table at the start of each round. Whenever a player wins a trick, that player drafts one die from the pool. McDonald explains that these dice carry a suit but no rank, so a die works like a zero that any other card of its suit can beat. A die can be used to break the must-follow rule and win a trick a player could not otherwise take. McDonald notes that players often spend dice to avoid taking a card with leaves or skulls, so the draft serves two purposes at once: it adds flexibility later in the round, and it offers a way to dodge a costly trick.

The Mori Experience

Tension Over Every Hand

Reviewers describe Mori as a steady, low-grade tension. Players sit with their hands for long stretches, weighing whether to spend a die now or hold it, and whether to play a rot card before someone else does. McDonald says the rule-breaking dice and the rot cards make every turn tense, admitting to staring at the cards asking whether to play a card now or save it.

The rot-card dynamic produces moments that feel social as well as tactical. When a player leads with a rot card and everyone else follows with one, the leader collects them all. McDonald reports that the group often expected someone else to have spent their rot cards, only to be caught holding them anyway. That kind of read across the table gives the game an edge that goes beyond card counting.

A Quick, Thinky Filler

Despite the depth, Mori moves quickly on paper. McDonald says a round takes about half an hour and that the game often comes out as a filler or gets played while the group waits for a fourth person to arrive. McDonald calls it one of the most strategic trick takers played in recent memory and points to the dice and the second-most scoring rule as the reasons. The Broken Meeple has a different experience, describing a session that lasted around an hour with a lot of thinking at the table.

What Makes Mori Stand Out

Rot Cards and the Second-Most Scoring Rule

The most praised feature of Mori is its scoring. At the end of a round, the player holding the most rot cards loses a point for each one, while the player holding the second most gains a point for each one. Ties cost or reward both players. McDonald calls this a clever mechanism that keeps the game swingy, noting that a player can lead one round and then collect the rot cards in the next. McDonald reports that the swings never felt like a knock on the game, because they kept trailing players in contention and made the late rounds more exciting.

Artwork and Production

Reviewers consistently praise the card art. McDonald credits Beth Sobel, also known for Wingspan, and says the cards with skulls mixed among flowers look gorgeous. The Broken Meeple likewise calls the artwork striking and says the deck is one of the more interesting they have seen in a trick taker. McDonald notes that the dice have a nice weight and carry the suit logos. The deluxe edition adds wooden rot tokens and a wipe-off scoreboard with a dry-erase marker, which saves a trip to find a notepad. McDonald finds the wooden tokens light and less interesting than the rest of the components.

Potential Drawbacks

A Hard Game to Teach

The Broken Meeple is the most direct critic on teaching. The reviewer calls Mori the hardest game in the video to explain and says it is a nightmare to teach. The rulebook is described as not the best, and the reference card as fine but not amazing. The problem is compounded by the season trumps, where flower symbols stand in for the seasons and are hard to read. The reviewer believes better graphic design could make the trump system clearer for new players.

Playtime on the Box

The printed playtime of 30 minutes draws consistent complaints. The Broken Meeple argues that the box understates the game and that a session takes closer to an hour, especially at four or five players. McDonald reports a half-hour round at a lower player count, but also warns that some players can get bogged down in analysis paralysis when deciding what to play. The gap between the box and the table is one of the more practical concerns for buyers who want a quick game.

If You Enjoy Mori

Players who enjoy Mori's dice that break the must-follow rule will find similar satisfaction in Seas of Strife. McDonald prefers Mori to Seas of Strife because of the dice and the second-most scoring mechanism, which together make the game tricky and strategic. Players who like the Allplay trump system and the sense of tracking who leads and which suit is trump may also enjoy Lunar, which McDonald describes as having metal pieces that mark the lead player and the trump suit.