Sunday, 16 June 2019

                    DARUMA-OTOSHI

The daruma-otoshi (だ る ま 落 と し) is a kind of removable daruma doll that we can easily find in 100 yen stores and that serves as a perfect gift to bring back to our country after a tourist trip to Japan.

traditional-Japanese-toys-daruma-otoshiIf we know Japanese, from the name of this game we can extract an idea of its purpose, since otoshi means "to throw to the ground" and daruma is the name of the character to whom the toy gives shape, a recreation of the image of the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma.

The daruma doll, when it appears as an amulet of good luck, is usually represented with a friendly and smiling face. However, the face that appears in the otoshi daruma may have a slightly more aggressive, fighting-like attitude, as if the daruma were angry. There is no concrete explanation of why this change, although everything indicates that it is to give more reality to the game: the daruma is angry because they are going to hit, dismount and throw him to the ground.

However, there is a reason for choosing the daruma doll for this game. The daruma is perfect, because it is always represented without arms or legs. For the game, the head of the daruma is placed on top of a series of stackable pieces that shape its elongated body.

To start playing, the pieces of wood are arranged on top of each other, from bottom to top, red, yellow, green and blue, ending with the head of the daruma doll on the top. The idea is to hit each of the stackable pieces with a small hammer, one by one from bottom to top, and try to remove a piece without dropping the head or dismantling the doll. The rules are simple, but the game is really complicated: get hit with enough force and precision to throw to the ground only one of the round pieces of the body each time without dropping the head or other parts.

The game is presented with the built-in hammer, which serves both to pull the pieces and to put them back together on top of each other, since all the stackable pieces have a hole in the center where the hammer can be inserted and thus make sure that all the pieces are well placed and stacked.

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