MyRin Kamon: Japanese Family Crest Puzzle Guide

Japanese family crests were designed to be recognised instantly: on a banner, a kimono, a roof tile. Kamon, the MyRin crest puzzle, asks your eyes for the same skill. On easy, colour does most of the work. On hard, every crest is rendered in the same gold and most of them are hidden, so you sort by outline and memory alone. Here is how to read the crests, and where they come from.

Kamon (家紋)

Kamon is a MyRin stacking puzzle in which Japanese family crests are moved between lacquer stands until each stand holds one kind of crest, with a hard mode that renders all eight crests in the same gold and hides every crest not yet uncovered.

How to play Kamon: the direct answer

Tap a lacquer stand to lift its top crest, then tap another stand to place it. A crest only lands on an empty stand or on an identical crest. You win when every crest of a kind is gathered on one stand. Easy and medium give each crest its own colour; hard stacks the stands seven deep, uses all eight crests, drops the colour and conceals everything you have not uncovered.

The mechanics are shared with Hue and Temari, so the same buffer rule applies: protect your empty stand, and never spend it on a crest you cannot immediately build on.

Learn the silhouettes before hard mode

On hard, there is no colour to skim, so you need to recognise each crest from its outline in a fraction of a second. Four of the crests carry most of the load:

• Sakura (桜), cherry blossom: five round petals. The only crest built entirely from curves.
• Kikyo (桔梗), bellflower: a five-pointed star. Historically the crest of the Akechi clan.
• Uroko (鱗), scales: three triangles arranged as a larger triangle. The mitsu-uroko was the crest of the Hojo clan.
• Yotsume (四つ目), four eyes: four diamonds set in a square.

In play, the pointed crests read fastest: a star and a triangle stand out against round petals even in a quick glance. That makes kikyo and uroko the best anchors. Find those first, then read the rounded crests against them.

Strategy for hard mode

1. Scan by outline, not by area. Without colour, a glance at the overall shape is faster than inspecting the inside of each crest. Train yourself to see points versus curves, and three parts versus four versus five.
2. Merge before you open. When two stands show the same crest on top, combine them before starting a new stand. It frees depth without spending your buffer.
3. Scout with the empty stand, then undo. As in Temari, an uncovered crest stays uncovered after an undo. Move a top crest aside to see what is below, remember it, and take the move back if it was only for information.
4. Keep a mental map. Hard mode is shape recall, not shape recognition: you must remember which hidden crest sits where. Name them silently as you uncover them ("uroko under yotsume on stand three"); a verbal label is easier to hold than a picture.

A short history of kamon

According to Nippon.com, kamon are thought to have come into use around the tenth century among the Japanese aristocracy, as status markers in the Heian period. In the Muromachi period some commoners began using crests, and in the Edo period common people were allowed to choose their own, with two exceptions: the chrysanthemum crest of the imperial family and the hollyhock crest of the Tokugawa.

Between those two stages, warrior families put crests on banners and equipment, where a crest had to tell allies from enemies at a distance. That battlefield use is where the kamon design style was tested hardest.

Today an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 family crests are in use in Japan. The five most common motifs are wisteria, paulownia, hawk feathers, flowering quince and creeping woodsorrel. Crests still appear on formal kimono, shop curtains, temple roof tiles and gravestones.

Their design principle is exactly what the game tests. A crest had to stay readable as a small, single-colour badge, so designers relied on strong silhouettes, symmetry and a small number of parts. That is why hard mode can drop colour entirely and still be fair: the crests were made for it.

What Kamon trains

Kamon exercises visual discrimination, telling similar shapes apart quickly, and on hard mode it adds visual working memory, because you must hold the positions of hidden crests you uncovered earlier. It is the most attention-heavy of the three stacking games in MyRin. For more on how attention training works, and what it can and cannot do, see attention training in MyRin.

For the culture behind the other MyRin games, the free ebook The Mind Games of Japan covers them chapter by chapter. MyRin is free on iOS and Android with 30 games and 18,000 levels; the full list is on the MyRin games page.

FAQ

How do you play Kamon in MyRin?

Tap a lacquer stand to lift its top crest, then tap another stand to place it. A crest can only land on an empty stand or on an identical crest. The level is solved when every crest of a kind sits together on one stand. On easy and medium each crest has its own colour; on hard all of them are gold.

How do I tell the crests apart on hard mode?

Read them by outline instead of colour. Sakura has five round petals, kikyo is a five-pointed star, uroko is three triangles and yotsume is four diamonds. The pointed crests, kikyo and uroko, are the fastest to recognise and make good anchors for the rest of the board.

What is a kamon?

A kamon is a Japanese family crest. Crests came into use among the aristocracy around the tenth century, spread to warrior families and later to commoners, and today an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 are in use in Japan. They still appear on formal kimono, shops, temples and gravestones.

Is Kamon the same game as Temari and Hue?

All three use the same stacking rules. Hue sorts coloured balls, Temari sorts thread balls with traditional colour names, and Kamon sorts crests, dropping colour on hard mode entirely. That makes Kamon the purest test of shape recognition of the three.