めるかるた (Meru Karuta)

めるかるた (Meru Karuta) is a Karuta game from Japan. Karuta is a classic card game in which one person reads a line on a card from a classic poem, and the other two players must snatch or guard the open card that has the successive couplet. In this game, Meru Karuta, the cards have tricky Kanji, the Japanese characters that derive from Chinese. Kanji are often hard for experienced Japanese readers, and the game plays on that problem. Each Kanji in the game is some version of a word with '-meru'. So players only have to get to something-meru in order to identify the card in question. However, the kanji are so tricky, and the game gives no assistance to help the readers, so there is no expectation for anybody to read it correctly, not the reader nor the players. Everybody is just meant to make the best they can and hack through it without worrying too much about accuracy. user summary