Perhaps the best version of Sanguine's rule system. It's quick, clean, and (appropriately for a samurai game) quite deadly.

The Usagi Yojimbo rpg by Sanguine is very well written and the lay out is easy on the eyes. The game system is easy to get used to as well. It is a dice pool type system where the highest die roll within the dice pool is compared to the difficulty number of a given task. The difficulty number may be fixed or random depending on the attempted action. I really prefer this edittion of USAGI Yojimbo over the FUZION version from a few years ago. The only thing that I miss is the monsters. There are no monsters to speak of in this edition of the game. There are some guidlines in the GM section of the book regarding monster creation but it is minimal at best. If you own the older version of this game then you should be able to adapt the beasties easily enough.

I would say by all means, buy this product if you don't already have Sengoku and the Gold Rush Games Usagi books. I do and felt burned by this purchase. I would have felt less so had creatures from Saki's world [aside from the anthropomorphic character options] been included. Part of the appeal of Usagi Yojimbo is Stan Saki's treatment of Japanese myth and the mystical creatures populating it. This book drops the ball.

Overall, this is an evocative RPG that's just begging to be played! This book contains a very nice overview of the UY universe and characters for those who aren't familiar with it (and those who are!). The system, while somewhat complex due to myriad options, has a sort of elegance when you fit it all together. Attributes and skills are represented by dice instead of numbers, which may be difficult for some people to adjust to, but it works very well to show the influence of attributes and career on skill use. The book is filled with well written examples drawn from the comics and translated into game terms, as well as many comic excerpts. Not only did I enjoy reading this, I am looking forward to running it. Also, being able to print out the tons of sample PCs is a nice PDF benefit.