Yakko Tako Royale

Sixteen players. One sky.

This is the big one. Host a match on Steam, and up to sixteen kites fly into the same arena from up to sixteen machines. The board stretches to four screens of sky, the camera rides with your kite, and every string in the air belongs to somebody real.

Browse open games or keep it to your friends. Ready up in the lobby, the host presses START, and everybody drops into the same fight at the same moment. When it ends, one button starts the rematch and the whole lobby comes with you.

Kite fighting, the real thing

Kite fighting is a sport played across South Asia, East Asia and the Middle East, and the rule is the same everywhere. You do not shoot anybody down. You bring your line across their line, and you cut.

Yakko Tako Royale plays by that rule. Every kite hangs from a string that runs a long way straight down, and that string is the only thing anybody can take from you. Fly above a rival and their string is right there in front of you. So is yours, to them.

Still made for the couch

The couch game is all here, exactly as it should be. Two to four players, one screen, one machine. Everybody picks a bay, picks a kite and presses START. No accounts, no waiting, because everybody is already sitting in the room.

No friends around? Add bots. Four skill levels, tuned to keep the fight interesting whether you are two on the couch or on your own.

Thirty-one kites, patang and pipa included

The roster runs from the yakkodako of Edo Japan to the fighter kites of the Indian subcontinent. Patang, chand, addha and dabba fly alongside oni, kitsune, tanuki, hannya, kappa and a long line of yokai, each one painted rather than modelled. From Brazil come the pipa, the arraia, the papagaio and the square curica, in papel-de-seda colours. The tako itself flies too, tumbling end over end when it lunges.

Every kite flies the same. What you pick is who you are on the screen, not an advantage over the player next to you. In a sixteen-player sky, that matters twice.

Four arenas, six formats

Fight above the islands of Batsu, down in the deep water of Shinkai, under the great wave in Back to Edo, or inside Yume, a dream that puts on a different look every time you enter.

Pick a timed round where the most cuts wins, a first to 3, 7 or 12, a battle royale where a cut is final, or last survivor. Online with sixteen kites, battle royale means exactly what it says: the sky empties one string at a time until one kite is left flying.

The seven lucky gods, re-armed

Daruma drift across the board. Fly into one and you catch the god inside. In a duel each god does what it always did, expressed in the only currency a fight has: damage on a string, and the passes a rival needs to take it. In a sixteen-player sky, a well-timed Bishamonten is an event people will talk about after the match.

An evening at the festival

Grab controllers, pick kites, play. Anyone can learn it in one round: cut their string before they cut yours. Your friend cuts you, you spend the next round hunting them. Whoever is winning gets ganged up on. Rematch is one button, so "one quick game" turns into a whole evening.

Learn it in one sitting

A hands-on tutorial runs inside a real arena with real physics, not a slideshow. Twenty-three chapters take you from your first press to the last god, and the game checks that you did each thing before moving on. Controller prompts show the buttons on the pad in your hands, whether that pad is an Xbox controller, a DualSense, a Switch pad or the Steam Deck.