Tanto Cuore Review – Fix Dominion With Your Own Anime Harem Of Maids

Disclaimer: Tanto Cuore was provided for free by Japanime Games, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

In Tanto Cuore, you’ve been isekaied and awoken in a fantasy world. Now you’re the master of a house, and your job is to put together the perfect harem of maids. Employ them with your love, keep them healthy and if you’re lucky convert them into chambermaids.

If you haven’t already noticed Tanto Cuore is very, very anime.

You start the game with a deck of 10 cards, drawing a hand of five at the start of every turn. During your turn, you can play one maid, and employ one maid from the general supply using love as a currency.

These maids may give you additional actions, or provide you with other benefits and abilities. So as you fill your deck by employing more maids, your turns fill up with tough choices and fun combinations to play with.

Eventually, you’ll employ maids who can become chambermaids.

Then instead of using your action to play these maids, you can send them to your private chamber. While this is the predominant way to gain victory points, you’ll no longer be able to play that card for its benefits.

More powerful than even the chambermaids are the private maids. When employed private maids go straight to your private chamber and provide you with free passive benefits to be used on your turn.

Play continues until two maid piles from the general market are empty. At that point, you count up all of your victory points from cards in your deck, and in your chamber, and whoever has the most wins.

A serving of nostalgia

Tanto Cuore puts all the anime stereotypes on full display. Young girls dressed cutely, vying for the attention of the master of the house. This is straight out of the recent Re: Zero – Starting Life in Another World, but now you can experience it on your tabletop.

This is a big plus for Tanto Cuore, as anime is awesome. Except when it gets too explicit and ecchi (suggestive or indecent), making it awkward to pull out in front of your friends and family.

While Starlight Stage crosses this line, Tanto Cuore‘s art is more modest. So despite a touch of risqueness, it’s no worse than what you see in Western media, and no one should give you a stink eye for too long.

And thank goodness for that!

Because once you start playing, Tanto Cuore is quite a delightful little deck-builder.

It doesn’t deviate too much from the tried and true formula created by Dominion. But where it deviates, it elevates. You still have the static market for example. Allowing you to piece together your deck with known parts, creating long-term strategies.

Meanwhile, Tanto Cuore elevates this by introducing private maids. These supermaids offer you passive bonuses strong enough for you to change your plans and build a deck around them instead. This doesn’t give you that pit crew mechanic feeling of running back the same strategy with incremental improvements that Dominion does. But it’s more involving while you’re in the midst of play.

These private maids also act as a direct line between you and your opponents. Initially, you race to secure the best private maids before anyone else. But once gotten, you’re also able to sabotage other players’ maids by giving them illnesses, or bad habits. Effectively cancelling out their points and special abilities.

Big love does nothing

While it’s still possible to do the ‘Big Money’ or in this case ‘Big Love’; a strategy in Dominion where you ignore the market and focus on collecting money, and points. It isn’t as effective. Opening up the game to a number of its other strategies. Most of which are rarely as straightforward.

For example, the Safran Virginie cards give you an increasing amount of points the more you have, while the Colette Framboise cards award you 1 point each, but an additional 5 points if you have the most Colette cards.

But again, as you use these strategies, you must always weigh up when you want to score. As scoring requires them to be Chambermaids. But in sending them to your private chamber you give up a lot of power within your deck. A fascinating, and fun problem to mull over.

Without the Big Love strat available, you find yourself picking up more maids than love cards. Forcing you to make some tough choices, as you may have a handful of maids, but only so many actions per turn. Going back to the previous decision of whether it is worth chambering a maid, or will using another card give you more power right now?

Tanto Cuore encourages and rewards experimentation. So the more you play, and learn how the cards interact, the better you become at making these tough decisions. And that’s why it’s an excellent addition to the deck-building genre.