She’s not just voiced by Miyuki Sawashiro, she pretty much is Miyuki Sawashiro.

Summary: The landlady pays a visit to Hidamari Apartments, bringing the Game of Life with her. After the girls find out that most of the events in the game are things they can’t relate to at all, the girls decide to modify the game and add some rules of their own. Nazuna becomes prime minister and Yuno wins a Nobel prize.

There are no better Hidamari Sketch episodes than the ones that have the girls perform extremely mundane everyday activities and make them out to be the biggest deal ever. After all, this is the show that managed to make 12 minutes of people getting a haircut genuinely entertaining. This week’s episodes marked the first time I’ve seen a board game being portrayed in such detail in an anime that isn’t Yu-Gi-Oh! and the many creative art quirks and references to older episodes of Hidamari Sketch made this into one of the greatest, most adorable episodes yet.

I always suspected Hidamari Apartments to be some sort of hippie cult.

It was all fun and games until Miyako opened up a beer.

Yuno is Number 1!

The beast is loose! Restrain her!

Your friends are allowed to be jerks if they make faces like that when they do it.

Those glasses are way too small.

Painters don’t look like that anymore! What would unemployed, lonely and mildly insane look like?

They said “designer”, so it was either this or a shut-in nerd.

She can’t learn, how she’s supposed to teach?

I voted for her.

It’s probably just a plane.

Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!

It took me quite a while to figure out that is supposed to be Sae’s shoulder and not Hiro’s bare breast pressing against her back.

Random Observations

• All of the event squares on the girls’ customized game board refer to previous episodes, and that’s not where the references end.
• Chika calling Sae right when she had landed on Nazuna’s “Talk like a cat for two turns” square was so set up. If anyone can pull a ruse like this one off, it’s Nori.
• Nori blaming “prime minister” Nazuna for her in-game unemployment was probably one of the best jokes in all of Hidamari Sketch history.
• Speaking of Nazuna, looks like the landlady has found a new favourite toy. All of a sudden, she reminds me of Nobue from Strawberry Marshmallow, though that might also be the lazy attitude, smoking habit and tendency to troll.
• The fake money used in the game has been printed by the Bank of Shaft. This is ironic in many, many ways.