Japanese: The Game is a language-learning card game. The cards in the game each have a Japanese word on the obverse. Players use these cards to build melds following a color pattern that forces the melds to be grammatically correct Japanese sentences.

The game has solo, collaborative, and competitive modes to allow for play and learning in both individual and social situations. The game play in competitive mode allows for building and improving one's melds to gain points that enable the player to eliminate opponents' melds.

The educational focus of the game is to practice sentence-building in a fun environment. This practice has the side-effect of exposing players to the vocabulary on the cards as well as training the mind to create proper Japanese sentences with any Japanese words they learn or already know.