Samurai Sword - Tips & Strategies

Feel free to adopt any to help keep the game from running overly long.

1) Don’t combine initial honor points with points you gain. This way the game ends the moment a player is defeated 4 times independent of the amount of times they defeated other players.

2) Everyone lose an honor point when you have to reshuffle the deck. One way to keep track of time is by the amount of cards you go through in a game. This affects everyone evenly and acts as a natural countdown.

3) Everyone start with only 3 honor points. A natural result from #2 above. Makes the game have a bit more high stakes without being overly short from deck cycling and it allows for some fun come-backs.

Not all of these rules are always fair when you have specialty characters in the game that cycle cards or do greater damage with weapons, but these rules should help make the game length manageable.