Japanese Culture
A chapter-by-chapter tour of The Mind Games of Japan, MyRin's free ebook: complete rules for Go, Shogi, Mahjong, Hanafuda and Karuta, plus the Nikoli puzzle tradition.
Most brain-training apps ship with a settings screen and a store. MyRin ships with a book. My Rin: The Mind Games of Japan, Essential Edition is a full ebook, published by Stika Studio in 2026, included free inside the app on iOS and Android. It is the reason the app's Japanese identity is more than decoration: the games in MyRin descend from the games in the book, and the book tells you how to play the originals.
This is a tour of what is inside, part by part, so you know whether it is worth the tap.
The editorial line is stated on the fourth page and it is the best summary of the book:
Every chapter that follows keeps its complete, playable rules intact. That's the point of this book: you can put it down and start playing. What's trimmed is everything around the rules: the longer histories, the minor variants, the secondary names. Read it front to back, or turn straight to whichever game you have a board for tonight.
So it is not a coffee-table survey. Each game chapter follows the same structure: a short history, equipment, complete rules, a worked example, strategy, etiquette. If you own a Go board and have never played, the Go chapter is enough to play a real game tonight.
One chapter, on why games in Japan were treated as a do (道, a way), the same character that ends judo, kendo and sado, the tea ceremony. It traces the arc from Go's arrival in the Nara period, through the Edo shogunate's sponsorship of four rival Go houses and their annual castle games before the shogun, to the Meiji collapse of patronage, the founding of the Nihon Ki-in in 1924, the postwar arrival of mahjong parlours and pachinko, and the quiet founding of the puzzle publisher Nikoli in 1980. The chapter's argument is that endurance (shinbo) was always the point: a player who could not sit through a long, quiet middle game was understood to be revealing a character flaw as much as a tactical one.
"Five games, five complete rulesets: sit down and play tonight." This is the heart of the book.
The Go chapter's diagram shows a 9x9 board after four moves. Black plays E5, the centre point called tengen, claiming influence over the whole board at once. White answers at C3, staking the lower-left corner, because corners and sides are cheaper to secure than the centre. Black plays G7, a mirroring foothold in the upper right. White plays C7, extending toward the upper left to build a larger framework along the left side. After four moves the game's essential shape is visible: both players are staking out loose areas of potential territory rather than fighting. That staking-out phase is the fuseki; the middle game decides which framework survives. It is the kind of example the book prefers: small, concrete, and immediately reusable.
Three chapters: Sudoku (its American birth, Japanese naming, and the 2004 newspaper boom), The Nikoli Puzzle Family (Kakuro, Hashi, Nurikabe, Slitherlink, Masyu, and the house rules of unique solutions and no guessing), and Word Games (shiritori and the play of kana). This part connects most directly to the app: MyRin's Sudoku, Kakuro, Hashi and Nurikabe are these puzzles, with 600 levels each. The blog version is Nikoli and the Japanese logic puzzle tradition.
Ten MyRin games run free in your browser, five levels each, no account.
Play free in the browserFour shorter chapters: Where Japan Plays (board game cafes, parlours and the clubs where old houses and new Eurogames share a table), The Games of the Ainu (the indigenous games of Hokkaido, a subject most game books skip entirely), Legends (the "blood-vomiting game" of 1846, Honinbo Dosaku, the first title-holder to lose to an engine) and Cafes and Design (why Japanese game components look the way they do).
The pages you will actually keep open at the table: the Yaku Quick Reference for mahjong and hanafuda, a page of Favourite Proverbs from Go and Shogi ("corners first, then sides, then centre"; "sente is worth more than a few stones"; "castle first, attack second") and a Glossary of the Japanese terms used throughout.
Install MyRin, open the ebook section, and read; it is free and needs no account. The reader supports pinch and double-tap zoom on the diagrams. If you would rather see the table of contents first, the ebook page lists every chapter. And if you want to test whether the games are for you before reading about their ancestors, ten of them are playable free in your browser.
Yes. It is included inside the MyRin app on iOS and Android at no cost. Open the app, go to the ebook section, and read; there is no separate purchase and no account.
Go, Shogi, Riichi Mahjong, Hanafuda (Koi-Koi) and Karuta with the Hyakunin Isshu, each with equipment, complete rules, a worked example, strategy notes and etiquette. Sudoku and the Nikoli family are covered in Part III.
Yes. It is written in English, with Japanese names shown in kanji and translated on first use. The app itself is available in 14 languages.
The ebook keeps every chapter's complete, playable rules and trims the surrounding material: longer histories, minor variants and secondary names. It is designed so you can put it down and start playing.