Sentences written about this title, gathered by type from the Japanese and English Wikipedia articles (as of 2026-8-30).
It is the 1st title in the company's Arcade Archives line.
In the "Cross Review" in the 1990-9-28 issue of Famicom Tsushin, the PC Engine version scored 6, 6, 7 and 6 for a total of 25 out of 40.
In the "review just before release" in the 1990-11 issue of Gekkan PC Engine, the PC Engine version scored 75, 75, 75, 85 and 85.
In the "Cross Review" in the 1991-6-14 issue of Famicom Tsushin, the Game Gear version scored 6, 7, 7 and 5 for a total of 25 out of 40.
In the "BE Mega Dog Race" in the 1991-5 issue of BEEP! Mega Drive, the Game Gear version scored 7, 5, 7 and 6, for an average of 6.25.
The arcade version of this game was also the first title Success made using a Sega board.
The designer of the arcade version was Hideki Tamura, who later did the character design for Cotton, and this arcade game was Tamura's first video game.
Hamster Corporation released the arcade version outside Japan for the first time as part of their Arcade Archives series for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 in May 2025.
In the citation for the 3rd "Horii Award / Kiya Award" (first half of 1989), where the game won the "Semi-Horii Award", Yuji Horii and Yoshio Kiya praised how easy it is to pick up and the ideas in its rules.
In a review in the 1991-4 issue, the writer Akihito Tomisawa said that, unlike falling-block games with a strong action element such as Tetris and Columns, Ryukyu is a pure puzzle game, and rated it highly as "one of the 1 or 2 best" among the puzzle games he had played.
The Game Gear version was also sold outside Japan as "Solitaire Poker".
Ryukyu began as an entry to the "LOGIN Software Contest" run in the game magazine LOGIN, developed on an X68000 by the game creator Ryuji Kuwaki, then a university student living in Kyoto.
Ryukyu was designed by Ryuji Kuwaki, a college student at the time, as a submission to a software contest held by LOGiN, a regular extra issue of ASCII that eventually branched off to become Famitsu.
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