Kabuto Sumo: Sakura Slam

Kabuto Sumo: Sakura Slam is designed by Tony Miller, Michael Dunsmore, & John Brieger and published by Allplay (formerly Boardgametables.com). In this standalone sequel to Kabuto Sumo, insect wrestlers square off in an all-new arena. You can mix and match with any other released Kabuto Sumo game.

Project Overview:

Working alongside Tony Miller, the designer of Kabuto Sumo, we innovated on the physics-based gameplay that's made Kabuto Sumo into one of Allplay's best-selling titles. Together, our team pushed the design to its limits, creating some of our favorite wrestlers yet. Sakura Slam can serve as an entry point for new players to the series, or as an expansion to those who already own Kabuto Sumo.


Services Provided:

Design Diary

In the years since Kabuto Sumo's release, we've learned a lot from the thousands of players who've done battle in their rings, and designing the Total Mayhem expansion allowed us to experiment with the game system. So, in September of 2022, when Allplay asked us if we had more ideas for a new standalone product we all answered with an enthusiastic "Yes!"

What jumped to the top of our brainstorming list was experimenting with new shapes and sizes for the ring. We had several ideas: a square, a figure 8, a ring with a hole in the middle, a double-decker, or even a walled-in cage-like board. Some of these other ideas might come back in the future, but the ultimate winner was the square ring.

The next big step forward happened in March of 2023. John and Michael road tripped up from California to Oregon for a design retreat at Tony's rustic mountain home. Meeting in person was crucial because Kabuto Sumo is a tactile game which makes it hard to do more than brainstorm over the internet. It is impossible to overstate how important these 5 days were to the design of both Sakura Slam and Swarm. The creative energy flowed fast and heavy, as we rapidly iterated on the game with foam core board, plywood bits, scrap cardboard, and wooden dowels. In under a week we went from just the idea of a square ring to having ring dimensions, corner posts, the entrance platform tied to corners, and even the idea of the corner slam.

Some of the new board + new setup configurations didn't change the flow of the board enough, some made the pushing options too limited, and still others created weird “logjams” where lines of pieces across the diagonals would get bound together. A combination of adjusting posts, setup configurations, ring size, and platform size created the effects we were looking for to make for more dynamic pushing angles and unusual “lanes” of movement— but we still wanted to integrate the new arena more deeply.

Tagging corners addressed two of our biggest design goals: building an accelerator into the core rules of the game, and maximizing use of the new board. The corner slam, getting to push an additional piece after entering from all 4 corners, put a delightful wrinkle into the flow of the game. We loved adding a bit of multi-turn strategy — small pushes working towards setting up a game winning corner slam. Combining the corner slam with wrestler moves can lead to some huge turns. We showed these concepts to Joe Wiggins and Chad DeShon from Allplay and pushed onward with the design through 2023.

Having already released 18 unique wrestlers, creating this newest batch of wrestlers really pushed our creativity and forced us to go weirder and broader than ever before. To make our job even harder, we set the requirement that most of the wrestlers should be both forwards and backwards compatible.

Our process for designing wrestlers involves testing and refining hundreds of possible laser-cut wood shapes to create our final development designs, which are then refined by Kabuto Sumo's graphic designer, Anca Gavril. We then pair those shapes with bugs that have interesting real world behaviors, our best (or at least cringiest) pop culture puns, and game mechanics that reinforce all of the above. We're extremely proud of the new cast of characters and feel that they are some of the most exciting wrestlers we've ever made.

In early January, when putting final touches on Swarm powers, we had a 7 hour testing day where we and a few dedicated testers drafted Swarm teams from all 28 wrestlers to evaluate cross-product combos. A colleague said, "Wow, that's a lot. You've got to be sick of it by now." But after years of working on this line, and literally hundreds of games of Kabuto Sumo, the best endorsement that we have is that we all still love playing it. We hope you do too.

— Tony Miller, Michael Dunsmore, and John Brieger

See more on the Kabuto Sumo: Sakura Slam Kickstarter page.

Brieger Creative Team