A nasty bout of the flu left Sae Kitaoji bedridden her whole first week at the prestigious Ootori Academy. Returning to school to find her classmates have all solidified into cliques, she instead chooses to spend her lunch break playing mahjong on her phone and lamenting her fate. Despite her love for the game, she's embarrassed about being seen playing it since it's something only uncles are into ... so imagine her surprise when the Class Princess Chise Kannami pops up behind her and takes an interest. Although Sae is flustered by the attention at first, as she teaches Chise and a growing circle of friends how to play mahjong, they bond over their mutual appreciation for the game.
Good Day to You, How About a Game? (Gokigenyou, Ikkyoku Ika ga?) is a seinen yonkoma manga written and illustrated by Tsukasa Unohana, which began serialization in Manga Time Kirara Carat in 2022. It mixes Slice of Life with fantasy sequences showing the girls' Digital Avatars dueling in their mahjong mobile game.
Good Day to You, How About a Game? provides examples of:
- Anime Chinese Girl: The mobile game the characters play has a strong Chinese aesthetic (since mahjong is a Chinese game). Aside from their Digital Avatars being fancy animal girls wearing elaborate Chinese-style clothing, the CPU players are dressed in stereotypical Mandarin garb with Odango Hair.
- Behind the Black: In chapter 3, Sae and Chise go all-out dueling with each other ... only for the CPU player to take them by surprise and win when they weren't looking.
- Bland-Name Product: It's a manga, so naturally the girls eat at old standby WcDonald's in chapter 5.
- Christianity is Catholic: The series takes place in what seems like a stereotypical Catholic academy — Chise even prays to God for Sae to win her mahjong game in chapter 1, and a little cross pops up from her steepled hands.
- Class Princess: The very first page of chapter 1 shows Chise surrounded by fawning admirers, begging to eat lunch with her. Sae's monologue remarks that she's known as "Chise the Goddess" by her fellow students.
- Closet Geek: In the beginning, Sae has to play her mobile mahjong in secret. She fears that mahjong isn't just one of the "Games of the Elderly", but also one of the "Games of the Commoner" as well — not to mention its gambling elements don't sit well with Old Money like her classmates.
- Covers Always Lie: The cover depicts Sae sitting at a mahjong table in her school uniform. However, the girls don't play mahjong in real life. They play it through a mobile game on their phones, and inside the game they're depicted as their animal-girl avatars rather than as themselves.
- Deep-Immersion Gaming: When playing their mahjong mobile game, Sae and Chise imagine themselves as their Digital Avatars, seated around the mahjong table having a heated battle.
- Digital Avatar:
- Exposition: For a game as complex as mahjong, both Sae and the scanlators' notes have to lay out the rules as they come up. The many, many rules.
- Expy: Saionji is a red-haired sycophant who idolizes the popular girl and is introduced spying on the main characters before ambushing them with a condescending, tsundere-like attitude. In other words, Kana Ushiku from the author's previous manga, Anima Yell!.
- Fish out of Water: Sae attends an elite girls' academy, but sticks out among the fancy young ladies like a sore thumb. She keeps her love of mahjong secret, since she's afraid they're snooty and will look down on her.
- Footnote Fever: The English-langauge scanlations come with multiple pages of notes explaining the byzantine rules of mahjong. Not so much in the Chinese-language scans, since ethnic Chinese are expected to know the basics of the game merely through Pop Culture Osmosis, although Japanese mahjong does have somewhat different rules than the varieties played in other regions.
- Games of the Elderly: Sae is deeply embarrassed about her mahjong hobby, since it's "the thing uncles usually play," as her classmate Saionji put it. However, once Class Princess Chise states she plays it, the easily-swayed sycophant Saionji immediately flip-flops and praises how open-minded she is.
- Genki Girl: Despite seeming like your average cool beauty at first, Chise gets as excited as a puppy when she watches Sae play mahjong in chapter 1. Sae offers to let her press the button to win the game. It's enough to make Chise break out into a huge, beaming smile.
- Guilty Pleasures: Sae loves playing mahjong on her phone, but decides to keep it a secret from all the elite young ladies at Ootori Academy since she's afraid they'll dismiss it as a game for peasants. However, when Chise sneaks up behind her and takes a peek, she's intrigued by what she sees.
- Ms. Exposition: Sae plays this role in this Cute Girls Doing Cute Things series; she explains to Chise (and the reader as well) the basic rules of the game, starting from the basic hands of Chow, Pong, and Kong.
- Odd Couple: The series is about an extroverted Class Princess, Chise, befriending a friendless introvert, Sae, over the game of mahjong.
- Ojou: Ootori Academy naturally attracts ojou, due to its prestige. The manga's title even uses "gokigenyou", an excessively-polite greeting stereotypically associated with Proper Ladies.
- One-Gender School: Ootori Academy is a private Catholic academy that only accepts girls.
- Out Sick: Sae was out the first week of school due to the flu, so she missed her chance to join a clique and feels left out.
- Pastiche: The manga takes place in a prestigious, all-girls' Catholic academy ripped straight out of Maria Watches Over Us-land.
- Punny Name: Sae Kitaōji's online handle is "North," since that's what exactly the "Kita" in her surname means.
- Slice of Life: It's the latest in a long line of Manga Time Kirara manga about the daily lives of moe girls doing an activity together. Last time, Unohana-sensei wrote about cheerleading. This time, it's Mahjong.
- Throwing Down the Gauntlet: In chapter 3, Sae is mortified at the thought of dropping honorifics when speaking with Chise ... until Chise quips she might get another Suuankounote , at which point Sae sprouts some Cross-Popping Veins and gladly accepts her challenge.
- Yonkoma: Like its Kirara brethren, the manga is a four-panel comic, but it uses the wide layout (four panels that stretch all the way across the page) instead of the more-common Kirara style of two columns with four panels each. However, it also gets double the page count (16 pages) over a standard Kirara series (8 pages), so it's still about the same length.
