Yamadori (山採り) is Japanese for “collected from the mountains.” In bonsai, it names both a practice — climbing into the wild to collect a tree — and the trees themselves: gnarled, weathered survivors that no nursery could ever replicate. It's also the name of our game, and once you know the word, you'll know why.

The practice

For centuries, the most prized bonsai haven't been grown from seed in tidy rows. They've been found: a juniper clinging to a cliff face, dwarfed by wind and thin soil; a pine bent into a question mark by fifty winters of snow. A collector hikes up, studies the tree, and — carefully, sometimes over multiple seasons — frees it and carries it home to a pot. That tree arrives with something money can't manufacture: decades of real history written into its trunk.

The mountains do the early styling. Hardship gives the tree its movement, its deadwood, its character. The collector's job is mostly humility — take only what can survive the trip, and then spend years earning the tree's trust in its new pot. Among bonsai people, a great yamadori is the difference between buying a story and finding one.

Why we named a game after it

In Yamadori — the game — collecting is the heart of the loop. You step out of your little nursery, the whole world turning under your feet, and climb into the foothills. Wild trees appear with the morning, marked by inked birds circling overhead. The higher you climb, the older the find. When you spot one, you free it and carry it home on your back, through the torii gate, to a bench you've prepared. A found tree arrives already shaped by its mountain years — older, wilder, and more interesting than anything you could sprout from a seed packet.

From there it becomes the other half of the practice: watering on a real calendar, pruning cuts that heal over days, wire that needs real weeks to set. The mountain gives the tree its past; you give it its future.

A crooked trunk is a straight story.

The word we almost didn't choose

We could have called the game something obvious with “bonsai” in big letters. But yamadori is the part of bonsai culture that felt most like what the game believes: that the best things aren't bought, they're found and then kept. It's why trees in the game grow on real time that no purchase can skip, and why a tree you've kept for a full year can become a real one.

Yamadori: go up the mountain, find something wild, and bring it home. That's the game. That's the word.

— Chase