Sakura Wars-inspired board game Maid Knight Saga gets an English release
Clean up evil.
Maid Knight Saga, a Japanese deckbuilding game inspired by classic video game series Sakura Wars, is getting an English-language release.
Originally released as Shitamachi Maid in 2019, the premise of Maid Knight Saga is very much what it says on the box. Players are students at the Royal Academy of Faltisia, who must work their way toward graduating as a ‘combat maid’ - a vital role tasked with protecting the country.
Developer Laugh Sketch’s deckbuilder is heavily inspired by Sakura Wars, the long-running series of Japanese video games originally published on the Sega Saturn in 1996 before seeing a reboot in 2019. The games are a mix of dating sim, visual novel and action RPG - turn-based or real-time, depending on the entry - in which players interact with an all-female division of soldiers who fight demons in steampunk mechs. Between missions, the unit stays undercover as the operators of a theatre.
In Maid Knight Saga, up to six players draft cards to progress their student’s achievement in their studies at the academy. Cards can be used to attend specific lectures and extra classes, helping to boost statistics such as strength, wisdom, beauty and purity, and skip others with the aim of focusing on extra-curricular activities to specialise in other traits.
The board game is set over the course of three years - 60 to 90 minutes in real time - with players eventually gaining their Combat Maid licence, which grants them a unique power to use during missions in pursuit of game-winning victory points. Gold can also be earned to buy items to further boost each character’s stats.
Maid Knight Saga: The Story of Faltisia - Complete Edition will comprise both an English-language version of the original game and expansion London Operation, which relocates the action to 19th-century Britain and introduces new characters and gameplay rules. The revamped base game, being offered via a Kickstarter campaign, will include a new solo mode and two-player variant.
The English-language edition of Maid Knight Saga will be released by LionWing, which has localised Japanese tabletop games including Evangelion-inspired mecha battle game Embryo Machine and social deduction RPG Picaresque Roman.