NKODICE: its lineage, descendants, and standing in Japan
01What this origin is
NKODICE is a dice game developed by the individual creator ksym and released on Steam in May 2021, based on the traditional Japanese gambling game Chinchirorin. Its hook is that rolled dice show hiragana-like symbols that combine into crude or sexual words, and it became a viral hit, reaching the top of Steam's Japanese sales ranking in June 2021; it is the origin of a small wave of irreverent, word-combination novelty dice games.
02Sources
03Buried gems that carry this root
Woman Communication Buried gem
A high-speed word-hunt action game wrapped in a school novel. As a public-morals committee member, you watch girls' everyday chatter stream across the screen as fast-scrolling text, and your job is to spot the dirty words that accidentally assemble themselves when you re-read the gaps between words, and shoot them down like a shooting game. The trick is the Japanese reading game of ginata-yomi: shift where one phrase is cut and an innocent line suddenly hides a filthy one. You are scored on how many you catch, how fast, and how accurately, across over 100 sensitive words, with branching multiple endings driven by how you act and a mosaic mode built for streamers. Because the whole game is the sound and syllable structure of Japanese itself, it is structurally near-impossible to localize. Made by the Japanese solo creator YAMADA (GameCreatorNeko). Overwhelmingly Positive in Japan at 802 reviews and 99 percent, yet the West has barely found it: only 18 English reviews out of 802, about 2 percent. There is no English version: the store supports Japanese only, so the language itself is the wall.
Samui kara Nabe Kuitai ne Joon-chan to!! Buried gem
You are sharing a hot pot with a god of poverty, and the way you choose what goes in it is shiritori. The store explains the loop in two moves. A single character appears, say MA. You add one character to complete an ingredient, say MAME, beans. Now the next ingredient has to begin with ME, because that is where your own word left off. You keep going, chaining ingredient to ingredient, trying to build a pot that satisfies Joon Yorigami and also satisfies whatever extra rule the round has imposed. The part that makes it a real puzzle rather than a vocabulary drill is stated plainly on the store page: you are allowed to put in things that are not food. You will probably be told off for it. But sometimes the only way to reach the character you need for the ingredient you actually want is to throw something inedible in first, and the game knows that, and lets you decide how much of a mess you are willing to make on the way to a good pot. It is a Touhou Project fan work, and the store says so itself with a starred line. Made by ISY, the circle of one person who goes by Isui, whose entire catalogue of twelve Steam titles is Touhou fan work and whose developer and publisher fields are identical on all twelve; a direct check of each confirms no outside company anywhere in the record, and their off-Steam sales run through their own BOOTH shop. Released February 14, 2025 at ¥700, it is at 100 percent across 43 reviews (43 positive, zero negative per Steam's own review API), a paid title, not free, fully launched and not in Early Access, with no AI-generated-content disclosure and Steam's content descriptors completely empty. There is no English of any kind. The store's own English-language page still carries a Japanese short description, Steam could not build a URL slug from the title and left an underscore, and of the 43 reviews exactly zero are in English.