What is Punch Detective: Kiwami?

If you're familiar with the Yakuza / Like a Dragon series, you probably remember the re-release of the original Yakuza and Yakuza 2 as "Yakuza: Kiwami" and "Yakuza: Kiwami 2".  "Kiwami" translates loosely to "extreme" or "ultimate", and it was essentially a remake of those games from the ground up.  I don't think anything is wrong with Punch Detective, but there were a few house rules I often used as I played with my friends, and I found them useful enough that I thought I'd share them with the world.

What's included?

Fighting Styles: the protagonists of the Yakuza, Like a Dragon, and Judgment games have a fighting style all their own.  It's one of the many ways they express their character!   Whether that's rapid, lightning-fast kicks, powerful charged punches and throws, counters and parries, improvised defense using office equipment, or sheer panic, their style is one more dimension of their attitude!  Each character in Punch Detective now gains a fighting style, which will grant them a Battle Bonus (an extra die) once per fight.  Use those to your advantage and express yourself in and out of battle!

Extended Challenges: games in the PbtA universe, Blades in the Dark and Forged in the Dark, and more have been using "clocks" or tracks for a while.  They can be an easy way to keep track of progress on any long task that requires more than one action to achieve.  You can use it to track how far the detective team has gotten sneaking through a building, getting past the swarm of angry muscle protecting the evidence, or disarming the bomb in the back of the van.  Using this method, for each hit a character rolls on their dice, whether or not they meet the difficulty of the task, you mark a check box on the tracker; the goal is to finish the track before the opportunity passes, whether they get detected, time runs out, or the goons incapacitate them all!

Solo characters: With a shoutout to Jeff Stormer of the amazing podcast "Party of One", I've included a simple mechanic for one-on-one play.  Most of the Yakuza games spend a lot of time with a single protagonist at a time, and this game doesn't have to be different!  That said, the mechanics do expect the player to have some backup; if they're acting alone, they need a bit of a leg up.  To help them be more durable and more potent, we give them an advancement early -- an extra Fighting Style (and thus an extra Battle Bonus die to use) or an extra Heat Move gives them more options when push comes to shove.

I hope you all enjoy these updates!  Give the new mechanics a shot and let me know what you think via the usual channels: comments here, my email at vagentzero@gmail.com, or vagentzero on Twitter (I'm not calling it "X"), Bluesky, or dice.camp on Mastodon.  Look forward to hearing from you!