SO OFFENSIVE THEY ACTUALLY TOOK IT OFF THE SHELVES

Some games acquire the word Banned because it looks exciting on the cover.

Hentacle had to earn it.

Originally released in 2004, Hentacle is an extremely adult card game parodying hentai, tentacle erotica, anime stereotypes and the considerably stranger corners of Japanese-pop-culture fandom as understood through Western eyes.

It was created on a bet or dare.

This explains a great deal.

Players take the part of rampaging tentacle monsters competing for points through increasingly tasteless encounters with a cast of anime-stereotype characters. The humour is crude, the artwork is explicit, the puns are appalling and subtlety was apparently murdered during early playtesting.

Over the following years the game accumulated three expansions, more characters, more cards and eventually an entire competitive Versus mode.

Then, in 2016, Hentacle and its supplements were removed from the OneBookShelf family of sites following a content complaint.

So here it is again.

Hentacle – Banned Edition collects the original game and all three expansions into one downloadable print-and-play package.

No euphemisms.

No sanitised remake.

No attempt to pretend it grew up while nobody was looking.

YES, THIS IS VERY MUCH AN ADULT GAME

Hentacle is strictly for adults.

The original game was marketed as adult even by the standards of adult games, and that has not mysteriously changed with age.

It contains explicit sexual artwork, nudity, tentacle-sex parody, sexualised anime stereotypes, crude humour and material deliberately designed to be offensive, ridiculous and pornographic.

That is not a content warning bolted onto an otherwise conventional card game.

That is the premise.

If you want a tasteful little party game suitable for playing with the in-laws over Christmas, keep browsing.

If the title Hentacle made you laugh and you are already wondering how bad the cards can possibly be, you are substantially closer to the intended audience.

They can be quite bad.

THE WHOLE FILTHY LOT

The Banned Edition brings together the complete playable Hentacle line:

• Hentacle – the original 2004 game.

• Hentacle: Sloppy Seconds – the first expansion, adding more material to the basic game.

• Hentacle: Three’s An Orgy – the second expansion, adding two more girls and their associated cards.

• Hentacle: 4/Play – the third and final expansion, adding another two girls, more cards, a new sabotage-style “!” card and the new Versus Mode.

That makes this the sensible way to get Hentacle now.

As sensible as any sentence containing the words “the complete Hentacle collection” can reasonably be.

THE BASIC IDEA

Hentacle is a competitive point-scoring card game.

Players assume the role of tentacle monsters and compete over a collection of anime-stereotype characters, using their cards to build combinations, score points and generally demonstrate that everybody involved has made a series of poor moral and aesthetic decisions.

The original game is comparatively straightforward.

Cards interact.

Opportunities appear.

Players try to exploit them before somebody else does.

The subject matter provides the comedy while the competition gives everybody an actual reason to care what happens next.

That latter point is important.

A dirty joke printed on cardboard remains funny for approximately one reading.

A dirty joke which somebody can use to wreck the plan you have been constructing for the last ten minutes acquires staying power.

Especially when revenge becomes available on the following turn.

ANIME THROUGH A VERY DIRTY WESTERN LENS

Hentacle was never intended as a sober examination of Japanese culture.

It is a parody of anime stereotypes, hentai conventions and Western ideas about them, made at a particular moment in geek culture when imported anime was becoming vastly easier to obtain but was still surrounded by a great deal of misunderstanding, exoticism and urban legend.

Tentacle hentai sits at the centre of the joke because, for a long time, it was one of the things people who knew almost nothing about anime nevertheless knew about anime.

Or thought they did.

Hentacle takes that reputation and behaves disgracefully with it.

The characters are archetypes and caricatures.

The monsters are tentacles.

The art is deliberately indecent.

The game then piles jokes, genre references and pornographic absurdity on top until dignity is no longer recoverable.

This is not The Tale of Genji.

SLOPPY SECONDS

The first expansion did what expansions traditionally do.

It added more.

Sloppy Seconds expands the original game with additional adult material while retaining the underlying style and mechanics of Hentacle.

It comes from the early period of the line, when the central idea was already established and the obvious requirement was simply to give players more characters, more combinations and more reasons to look suspicious when somebody walked past the gaming table.

No revolution was required.

The formula already worked.

It merely needed further opportunities to go wrong.

THREE’S AN ORGY

Three’s An Orgy, released later as the second supplement, adds two new girls and their associated cards.

The expansion deliberately does not overhaul the game.

It expands the pool.

More characters mean more variety, and more cards mean more combinations and complications entering play.

It also marked the arrival of artwork by Darkzel, whose style became associated with a number of later Postmortem Studios products.

The title tells you approximately how seriously any of this is supposed to be taken.

Hentacle had already established its tone.

Three’s An Orgy merely noticed that there was still some remaining space beneath the barrel.

4/PLAY

Then 4/Play actually changed things.

The third and final Hentacle supplement adds another two girls, a large batch of additional cards and a new type of “!” card designed specifically for interfering with other players.

More importantly, it introduces Versus Mode.

This turns Hentacle towards direct player-against-player competition, with variants based around elimination or scoring.

The change matters because it points directly towards what came next.

4/Play was effectively a preview of the design direction later developed more fully in Call of Cthentacle, Hentacle’s Lovecraftian successor.

So buried underneath the tentacles and terrible jokes is a little bit of card-game design archaeology.

Somebody refined the system.

Admittedly, they refined it while staring at cards that would get you escorted out of many public buildings.

History is messy.

WHY “BANNED EDITION”?

Because Hentacle really was removed from its former major storefront.

In July 2016, Hentacle, its supplements and its art book disappeared from the OneBookShelf network, which at the time included RPGNow and DriveThruRPG.

Postmortem Studios stated that the removal followed what it believed to be a malicious complaint. The current Postmortem product description characterises the episode as a dishonest campaign which succeeded in having the game removed.

Whatever anyone thinks of that interpretation of the complaint itself, the uncontroversial part is simple:

the products were taken down and were unavailable there afterwards.

Hence Banned Edition.

It is not a marketing hypothetical.

Someone objected.

The platform removed it.

Years later, Postmortem put the complete game back into circulation through its own shop.

There is a certain grim satisfaction in that.

A SMALL PIECE OF INDIE-GAMING HISTORY

Hentacle is also old enough now to qualify as a peculiar little artefact of the early PDF and indie-game scene.

The original game dates from 2004.

That was before Kickstarter.

Before the current explosion of print-on-demand card manufacturing.

Before itch.io.

Before social media swallowed most of the internet.

Selling a filthy independent card game as printable files through an RPG storefront was itself a slightly odd thing to do.

Then people bought it.

Physical cards were produced.

Expansions followed.

It appeared at conventions.

It became controversial.

Other tentacle-themed card games appeared later.

Eventually Hentacle produced its own successor.

Then it got removed from the storefront where it had originally been sold.

There are considerably more prestigious histories in tabletop gaming.

Few involve this many tentacles.

THE GAME BEFORE CTHENTACLE

If you have encountered Call of Cthentacle first, Hentacle is where much of the lineage begins.

Cthentacle took the basic adult card-game idea, streamlined and reworked it, made player interaction more directly competitive and wrapped the resulting obscenity around Lovecraft rather than general anime parody.

Hentacle’s final expansion, 4/Play, already points towards this development through its Versus rules.

That means the two games are related without being identical.

Hentacle is the earlier, rawer game.

Cthentacle is the later redesign.

You do not need Cthentacle to play Hentacle and you do not need Hentacle to play Cthentacle.

They are separate games.

The family resemblance is simply difficult to deny.

Especially around the tentacles.

PRINT, CUT AND PLAY

This edition is digital and print-and-play.

There is no current manufactured Hentacle edition that we can point you towards with confidence.

You receive the files and produce the play set yourself.

Print the cards onto suitable stock or ordinary paper, cut them out, and use card sleeves if you want something sturdier and easier to shuffle.

For an older card game, this is also a practical way to preserve it.

No hunting for increasingly rare original decks.

No trying to locate an expansion somebody last sold at a convention in 2008.

No wondering whether your second-hand copy of Three’s An Orgy is missing three cards and something sticky.

Make the set.

Keep the files.

Try not to explain the printer queue to anybody from Human Resources.

WANT A PROFESSIONALLY PRINTED SUCCESSOR?

While Hentacle itself is currently a print-and-play product, its successor Call of Cthentacle is available as a professionally manufactured card game.

Cthentacle Deluxe is available from The Game Crafter.

Cthentacle takes the basic ancestry of Hentacle and develops it into a more polished, more directly competitive game, while replacing general anime parody with a comprehensively abused Lovecraftian Mythos.

It is also every bit as adult.

Nobody involved suddenly discovered restraint.

THE ART AND THE JOKE

A large part of Hentacle’s identity comes from the collision between deliberately pornographic imagery and the cheerful structure of a card game.

Cards have numbers.

Cards have effects.

Players think tactically.

Then everybody has to acknowledge what the illustration actually depicts.

That gap is the joke.

It is puerile.

It is tasteless.

It is occasionally genuinely clever.

It is often absolutely not.

Trying to rehabilitate Hentacle as sophisticated cultural satire would be rather like writing a doctoral thesis on a rude drawing found on the back of a toilet door.

There may indeed be things to say.

The rude drawing remains a rude drawing.

Hentacle knows this.

NOT FOR EVERYONE

A surprising amount of marketing copy tries to convince every possible customer that the product is secretly for them.

This one isn't.

Hentacle is for adults who enjoy obscene humour, anime and hentai parody, deliberately tasteless games, strange bits of tabletop history and competitive card games where ruining somebody else's plan is part of the entertainment.

Some people will find the concept offensive.

Some will find it juvenile.

Some will find the artwork repellent.

Some will laugh themselves stupid.

Those reactions have accompanied Hentacle almost since publication.

There is little point pretending otherwise twenty-two years later.

The game is called Hentacle.

The cover is not lying to you.

WHAT YOU ARE BUYING

Hentacle – Banned Edition (PDF) is the complete downloadable print-and-play Hentacle collection, containing the original game and its three published expansions: Sloppy Seconds, Three’s An Orgy and 4/Play.

Together they provide the original point-scoring game, the expanded character and card pools, additional sabotage options and the later Versus rules, including elimination and point-based competitive play.

This is the surviving digital edition of a game first released in 2004, expanded over the following years and removed from its former major sales platform in 2016.

It is crude.

It is explicit.

It is offensive.

It is ridiculous.

It was made on a dare, survived long enough to acquire three expansions and a successor, got itself banned from a major storefront, and is somehow still here more than two decades later.

At this point, you have to admire the bloody persistence.