The Elusive Samurai game collaboration: Eiketsu Taisen 2026

On 23 October 2026, The Elusive Samurai game collaboration is in its first week. Sega Fave's notice, dated that 21 October, says the arcade card game Eiketsu Taisen has started a reprint collab with the TV anime. The cabinet name on the notice is 英傑大戦 古幻相剋の八象. Players collect stamps by playing. The names on offer include Hojo Tokiyuki.

Two jobs, in that order. First the collab window, taken from the Sega notice and nothing finer than that page. Then Hojo Tokiyuki himself: a Hojo heir after the 1333 fall of Kamakura, the escape, the Nakasendai rebellion, and his death. The manga and anime sit between the cabinet and the chronicles. They keep the fall and the flight, then change the temperature. Survival comedy, superhuman dodges, and Suwa miracles are the show. A printed card can carry a face and a rarity mark. It cannot tell you which sentence began in a war tale.

If you already know the institutions, use them and skip the lecture. The Kamakura period page is the bakufu: Minamoto no Yoritomo, housemen, the Jokyu war, the Mongol invasions. The Hojo clan page on this site is the later Odawara house, the one broken in 1590, and it says so. Tokiyuki belongs to the earlier regent line. This page is the biography those two guides do not try to be. It is also a thin biography on purpose. Nobody left a day-by-day life of the boy.

What Sega posted on 21 October 2026

Eiketsu Taisen is a versus card-action game for amusement arcades. You play with a physical card. Sega's notice places it in a line that already had Sangokushi Taisen and Sengoku Taisen: Three Kingdoms, Sengoku, Edo and Bakumatsu, Heian, Spring and Autumn, and a medieval bracket, with an "ancient" set added when version 3.5.0 went live in May 2026. Hannibal, Alexander, and Taigong Wang are the examples Sega gives for that ancient set. The Elusive Samurai cast is filed with the medieval warriors, on the same battlefield as those other eras. That filing is a game rule. It is a poor history lesson. The Sengoku period is a later century of country-wide war. Tokiyuki's fights belong to the 1330s.

The notice calls the event a reprint. It does not, on the page opened for this article, retell the earlier run's schedule. What it does spell out is the 2026 autumn window. The stamp campaign's first half runs from 21 October 2026 at 7:00 through 3 November 2026 at 27:59. The second half runs from 4 November 2026 at 7:00 through 17 November 2026 at 27:59. Sega explains the odd clock in a footnote: 27:59 means 3:59 the next morning, used so the end does not look like a new calendar day. Read that way, the first half finishes in the small hours of 4 November, and the second half finishes in the small hours of 18 November. The dates printed on the notice still match the lead most players will see: 21 October to 17 November 2026.

Obtainable collab warriors, as named on that notice, split cleanly. First half: SR Hojo Tokiyuki, SR Kojiro, SR Ayako, SR Suwa Yorishige. Second half: SR Shizuku, SR Kazama Genba, SR Fubuki, SR Ashikaga Takauji. On the morning of 23 October, only the first list is in its window. Takauji's card is announced, not yet in that stamp half.

The same notice says a stamp is pressed each time you play, and that collab warriors and consumable items are handed out according to how many stamps you hold. It also says the campaign outline and the rewards will be published later on the official Eiketsu Taisen site. This article stops where that sentence stops. No stamp thresholds, no item ladder, no credit price for printing. Fan sites may already show those grids. They were not on the operator notice used here, so they are not repeated.

One mechanical limit is on the notice. If you want the warrior as a physical card, you play at a satellite terminal and choose card printing. Winning the portrait inside the campaign does not mail you cardboard. A second event shares the outer dates and should not be mixed in. The seventh point-shop runs 21 October 7:00 through 17 November 27:59 as well. Its 21 October additions are Roland, Chiyo of Kaga, and the nun Myorin. Later shop dates on the same page add other names. Those shop warriors are not The Elusive Samurai cast.

Sega's blurb for the anime is useful only as far as it goes. The original manga is by Yusei Matsui, the author of Neuro and Assassination Classroom, serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump. The notice credits the 69th Shogakukan Manga Award and says cumulative printings have passed five million. It says the first TV season aired in July 2024, and that a second season has been on Fuji TV's Noitamina block since July 2026. It does not give episode counts. This page does not invent them. The copyright line is Matsui, Shueisha, the production committee, and Sega.

Two Hojo names, one arcade portrait

Beginners hit a trap the moment the card says Hojo. Japan has two famous warrior houses under that name, and they are not father and son across one continuous government. Tokiyuki's house is the Kamakura regent line, the tokuso main line that ran the bakufu for more than a century while shoguns often sat as figureheads. The other house is the later Hojo of Odawara, sometimes called the Go-Hojo or Late Hojo, built in the Sengoku period from Izu and Sagami. Toyotomi Hideyoshi's coalition ended that house at Odawara in 1590.

Our Hojo clan article is the Odawara one: Soun, Ujitsuna, Ujiyasu, the Takeda rivalry, the 1590 siege. Read it when you want that Kanto daimyo story. Do not read Tokiyuki backward out of it. He never held Odawara. He never met Hideyoshi. The shared surname is a later political reuse of a famous name, and the card game will not warn you.

The era page is the other half of the prep. Kamakura period stops at how the first shogunate worked and why the Mongol defense strained it. Tokiyuki is what happens when that machine breaks and a child is the only usable remnant of the regent's blood. For the habit of pulling a famous picture off the record underneath, the myth versus reality guide is the general drill. This article is the drill applied to one collab and one boy.

Who Hojo Tokiyuki was

English Wikipedia's entry gives a birth year of 1329 and points at historian Suzuki Yumi's 2021 book on the Nakasendai rebellion, pages 38 to 39. The Japan Reference biography is looser and slightly different: born after 1325, about seven when Kamakura fell, about ten when the revolt started. A boy born in 1329 is not ten in 1335. Both accounts still agree on the only claim worth betting on. He was a child in 1333, not a grown politician with a paper trail of memos.

His father was Hojo Takatoki, the fourteenth and last shikken, head of the main line. His mother is already a source problem. Japan Reference notes that the Taiheiki calls her Niidono, while later manuscript copies say Shinden. If the mother's name wobbles between those copies, do not expect a nursery, a tutor list, or a reliable portrait of his temper. Other names attached to him in reference works include Sagami Jiro and the label Nakasendai itself, "middle former regime," the tag for the short Hojo revival squeezed between Kamakura and the Ashikaga.

The Japan Reference life also records an elder brother, Hojo Kunitoki, born 1325. In that telling he tried to flee Kamakura with an attendant, was betrayed, and was executed on Nitta Yoshisada's order. English Wikipedia lists Kunitoki as a relative and does not narrate the road. Treat the betrayal story as one secondary biography's scene. The shared fact is colder: the heir who matters for 1335 is the one who got out.

How the Kamakura shogunate fell

Go-Daigo took the throne in 1318 with a plan to govern in person. For generations the bakufu had managed the imperial house by alternating two lines, a senior line and a junior line. Go-Daigo, from the junior line, broke that bargain by naming his own son as heir. In 1331 the Genko War opened. Kamakura won the first round and exiled him to the Oki Islands. Loyalists kept fighting. Kusunoki Masashige is the name most war tales linger on. The military decision came in 1333 from two eastern men Kamakura thought it still owned.

Ashikaga Takauji was sent west to put the rebellion down. He changed sides. With the Rokuhara deputies in Kyoto destroyed, he planted his own office in the capital and started acting like a man who believed warriors should keep political power. At nearly the same time, Nitta Yoshisada led an army down the Kamakura Kaido. The Kenmu Restoration account, drawing on George Sansom and on Kamakura local references, lists clashes at Kotesashigahara, Kumegawa, and Bubaigawara before the city was besieged and taken. The same article dates the siege's end to 18 May 1333. Takatoki and a crowd of Hojo retainers killed themselves. The regency was over. Kamakura remained an eastern city. It stopped being the seat that gave orders to Japan.

Tokiyuki's escape is the small door in that collapse. English Wikipedia sends him to Shinano Province and the home of Suwa Yorishige, a Suwa lord who also stood as a priest of Suwa Taisha. Japan Reference adds Suwa Moritaka as the household man who extracted the child, then Yorishige as the shelter. Hide the heir, keep the name, wait for warriors who hate the new settlement. That is the political reading. The comic reading, flight as a superpower, comes later.

1. Go-Daigo defies the bakufu, loses in 1331, and is exiled. Loyalists do not quit.
2. In 1333 Takauji defects in the west. Nitta Yoshisada takes Kamakura. Takatoki dies. The regency ends.
3. Tokiyuki, still a child, is gotten out to Shinano and the Suwa.
4. Go-Daigo's Kenmu government tries direct imperial rule and mishandles warrior rewards.
5. In 1335 the boy's name becomes a revolt. Takauji crushes it and then breaks with the court.

Kenmu, 1333 to 1336, is the part beginners skip on the way to swords. Encyclopaedia Britannica's short account is blunt about the reward problem: the men who had made the restoration possible were neither paid properly nor brought into the new government, except Takauji, who received some lands and the comparatively low rank of counsellor and still expected to be named shogun. The English Wikipedia synthesis, following Sansom, adds favoritism toward great temples and top commanders, slow corrupt tribunals, and extra taxes for a palace. It also records a Taiheiki claim that shugo and jito posts in more than fifty provinces went to nobles and court bureaucrats. Mark that last item as war-tale evidence inside a modern summary. The direction of the grievance does not depend on the number fifty. Small warriors who had bet on Go-Daigo felt robbed. Former Hojo housemen had even less to hope for from a court that had just annihilated their patrons.

Go-Daigo tried to hold the east without planting a new shogun there. Ashikaga Tadayoshi, Takauji's younger brother, escorted another imperial prince to Kamakura and ruled in practice. Prince Morinaga (the name is also read Moriyoshi), a son of Go-Daigo and for a time sei-i taishogun, became Takauji's rival and ended as a prisoner in Kamakura. The city was full of men who remembered Hojo pay. A living son of Takatoki was a banner they could understand.

The Nakasendai rebellion

In the summer of 1335 those men moved. Tokiyuki was raised in Shinano with Suwa Yorishige behind him. Related Hojo plots in Kyoto failed around the same time. Japan Reference describes a court noble, Saionji Kimmune, sheltering Takatoki's brother Hojo Yasuie and aiming at Go-Daigo. That plot was broken and Kimmune killed. Yasuie got away. You do not need every side conspiracy to follow the main one. The army that mattered marched out of Shinano under the child's name, beat the local constable Ogasawara Sadamune in the secondary accounts, and drove east toward Kamakura.

The Kenmu article's outline, the one to memorize, is short. Tokiyuki's forces defeated Tadayoshi in Musashi. Tadayoshi fled. Before he left, he ordered Prince Morinaga beheaded, afraid the prince could lend imperial cover to a restored Hojo. Kamakura passed briefly into Tokiyuki's hands. Takauji, still in the west, asked Go-Daigo to make him shogun so he could rescue his brother. The court refused. Takauji gathered an army and went east without permission. He beat the Hojo, settled in Kamakura's Nikaido district, and when invited back to Kyoto let it be known he felt safer where he was. He started a residence at Okura, on ground tied to Yoritomo's old seat. By November 1335 the Ashikaga were calling warriors to destroy Nitta Yoshisada. The court ordered the opposite. In February 1336 Takauji was in Kyoto. Kenmu, as a government, was finished. The northern and southern courts come next.

How many days did the boy "rule" Kamakura? Secondary biographies say about twenty, and the nicknames "twenty-day former regime" and Nakasendai grew from that shortness. Japan Reference gives 22 July 1335 for the entry in one passage and talks of twenty days of holding the city. The hour is not fixed enough to teach. Short is the historical point. Experienced clerks had fled with Tadayoshi, so the revival could issue Hojo household orders and could not rebuild a bakufu archive overnight. A child banner plus angry housemen is a revolt. It is a weak government.

War-tale color piles on after that outline. Japan Reference's life includes a storm that wrecks Kamakura's Great Buddha hall and kills hundreds of Tokiyuki's men as the position collapses, then a defeat at Hashimoto in Totomi on 9 August 1335, with Yorishige and his son dead by suicide once the Ashikaga take the city back. Those are the sorts of scenes the Taiheiki tradition loves: weather as judgment, a famous building as a casualty, a priest-lord's suicide as the moral close. Use them as the story medieval audiences heard. Do not promote the body count to an audited figure. The political result is what the Kenmu synthesis and the Tokiyuki encyclopedia entry share, without needing the storm. The revolt failed. Takauji's unauthorized eastern campaign snapped the Kenmu settlement.

Pictures of a vast army behind the boy tempt people to shout "ashigaru." Save that word. The ashigaru page is about levied foot soldiers, pikes, and later guns in the Sengoku wars. Tokiyuki's supporters were leftover Hojo housemen, Suwa men, and other eastern warriors who had lost the Kenmu lottery. Foot followers walked in 1335. The Sengoku ashigaru system did not.

Pardon, the Southern Court, and a death in 1353

Defeat in 1335 did not end him, whatever an older English history once said. George Sansom's History of Japan has Tokiyuki killed in September 1335 as Ashikaga troops entered Kamakura. The English Wikipedia entry flags that date as a mistake, repeated from Sansom against the later record. If a book ends the boy in 1335, check whether the author simply stopped at Nakasendai.

The thinner, firmer sequel is on Wikipedia's biography. Soon after the defeat he asked Go-Daigo for a pardon and entered service with the Southern Court, the Yoshino line that kept calling itself the legitimate imperial house after Takauji backed a rival court in Kyoto. He fought under Kitabatake Akiie, and later under Prince Munenaga. In 1352 he helped Nitta Yoshioki retake Kamakura. When that effort collapsed he fled into Sagami, was found, and was beheaded by men loyal to the Ashikaga. Wikipedia dates the death 21 June 1353 and lists a burial place at Oshika in Shimoina, Nagano Prefecture. He would have been in his early twenties if the 1329 birth year holds.

Japan Reference fills the gap with a march itinerary: five thousand cavalry in Izu in 1337, a temporary recapture of Kamakura, a western push with Akiie, disaster at Ishizu in 1338, years of silence, then the Kanno disturbance and a third entry into Kamakura in 1352. It places the execution at the Tatsunokuchi grounds in Fujisawa and ties a lunar date in the fifth month to the anniversary of Takatoki's suicide, with retainers Nagasaki Suruga Shiro and Kudo Jiro killed beside him. Some of that may be solid local memory. A lot of it has the shape of war-tale campaigning, especially round troop numbers and a death date that rhymes with the father's. This page keeps Wikipedia's Gregorian day, mentions Tatsunokuchi as that biography's site, and refuses the rhyme as proof.

The Taiheiki is why the rhyme feels persuasive. English Wikipedia, citing Louis-Frédéric Nussbaum and Hiroaki Sato, calls it a late-fourteenth-century war tale running from 1319 to 1367. It is the usual narrative of the northern and southern courts, and it is openly dramatic. An English translation covers only part of the forty chapters. It will give you Go-Daigo, Takauji's betrayal of the Hojo, and the early war. It will also give you speeches nobody minuted. Pair it with the Kenmu outline when you want offices, refusals, and the fall of Kyoto. Pair it with Suzuki, via the citation on the Tokiyuki page, when you want a modern historian's birth year. The citation is reported here. Her footnotes were not re-opened for this page. The diary is absent.

• Sega's 21 October 2026 notice is the source for cabinet name, stamp dates, the eight SR names, the print-at-satellite rule, and the admission that the reward table was still to come.
• Britannica and the Kenmu Restoration summary carry Go-Daigo, Takauji, Nitta, the reward failure, and the 1335 march that Kenmu did not survive.
• The Tokiyuki encyclopedia entry carries escape, 1335, Southern Court service, and 21 June 1353. Sansom's 1335 death date is the error to retire.
• The Taiheiki and biographies that drink from it carry mother's-name variants, storm set pieces, long march lists, and symbolic anniversaries. Label them before you teach them as minutes.

What the manga and anime change

Matsui's series, 逃げ上手の若君, is built so a weekly reader roots for a boy who survives by running. English Wikipedia's popular-culture note is the sober version: Tokiyuki is the protagonist, shown as a young boy talented at fleeing and hiding. Sega's notice sells the same hook in advertising language and then calls the manga a telling of historical fact about the heir who runs through the troubled world trying to take Kamakura back. That last claim is marketing. The scaffold is historical. The week-to-week tone is not a chronicle.

Survival comedy means panic and narrow escapes played for timing. A war tale uses a narrow escape as proof of heaven's mood or a house's destiny. Matsui uses the same beat as a joke and as a power the child is strangely good at. Once flight is a talent, you are in fiction even when the place-names are real. Suwa faith is the other gear change. Historical Yorishige can be a sponsor and a priest without glowing. The show stages Suwa power as something you can see: visions and fights that ignore ordinary bodies. Enjoy that. File it next to the card's illustration credit, not next to the Taiheiki's storm, and not next to a shrine ledger.

The collab roster is a cast list, which is already a hint. Hojo Tokiyuki, Suwa Yorishige, and Ashikaga Takauji are historical people, the last of them Tokiyuki's actual enemy and, in life, the winner. Kojiro, Ayako, Shizuku, Fubuki, and Kazama Genba are the company Matsui assembled so a child protagonist has friends, gags, and fight scenes. Kazama is a surname with Shinano ninja folklore hanging off it in later centuries. That echo does not make Genba a documented 1335 officer. If a guide numbers episodes, it is doing work Sega's notice does not do. Skip the number.

Historical accuracy, for a viewer who still wants the politics, is a filter you apply after you laugh. Keep Go-Daigo as the emperor who broke Kamakura and then lost the warriors. Keep Takauji as the defector who wanted a warrior government with himself at the top, not as a cartoon devil invented for a rival card. Keep Nitta Yoshisada as the man who actually entered Kamakura in 1333, even if the show prefers the Suwa road. Keep 1353. A serial can delay a death because the hero has to appear next week. The Ashikaga, in the report Wikipedia summarizes, did not delay it past that June.

Historical Tokiyuki, the show, and the card

Read across a row before you read down a column. The history cell is allowed to say "disputed" and "about twenty days." The show cell is allowed to be fun and untrue in its physics. The card cell is the narrowest: Sega named the portrait, the rarity, and the half of the stamp campaign. Costs, troop types, skill text, and morale numbers circulate on wikis of the cabinet. They were not part of the notice, and they would not teach you the Genko War if they had been.

One honest use of the collab remains. A player who meets "Hojo Tokiyuki" and "Ashikaga Takauji" as opposite SRs has met the right enemies, in the wrong medium. The next click should be the regency and the fall, not a tier list. After 17 November 2026 the stamp window on this notice is over, aside from the 27:59 overrun into the next morning. Printing rules may linger. The history will not move.

Questions readers actually bring