National Economy

National Economy is a game from Japan. It is a worker placement card game. It is pretty compact. There are many elements which at first made me think - isn't this just like Agricola? As I played, I soon discovered it is more than that, and less than that at the same time. All in all, a different beast, despite several familiar concepts. 

The game is played over 9 rounds. You start with two workers. There are some common starting cards on which you can place your workers to use their effects. Every round a new common card is added. You can construct your own buildings, which are placed in front of you. They are your private buildings and only you can place workers on them. One interesting thing about this game is you will be selling your buildings in order to be able to pay your workers' wages. You must pay wages at the end of every round, and workers' wages gradually increase throughout the game. Expect to be selling buildings frequently. Sold buildings become public buildings. They are placed at the centre of the table, and anyone can use them now. 

The card powers are mostly simple. Some let you draw building cards from the deck. Some let you construct buildings. You can recruit new workers. You can gain consumer items. These are just generic cards which can be spent on constructing buildings. Building costs are expressed in cards and not money. You pay in cards, and this can be either other building cards or consumer item cards. Some buildings help you score points at the end of the game. That is, if you manage to keep paying your workers without selling these buildings. Money and remaining buildings are also points at game end. 

Notice that box cover in the background. This area is called the budget. It is a separate pool of money from the money supply. Most of the time you pay money to and get money from the budget. The only time you get money from the supply is when you sell buildings. This is a little unusual - having two pools of money to manage. This has gameplay implications and it is important, and I would say it is worth the effort. How much money is in the budget affects what you can and cannot do. 

Consumer items are just a generic resource. They are all the same in terms of gameplay, but the art on the cards varies. This is a nice touch. Not absolutely necessary for the sake of gameplay, but I like that they spend a bit more effort to improve the play experience. 

What I find most interesting is how you have to manage the buildings you construct and sell. Which ones you choose to construct, and which ones you choose to or are forced to sell will affect your play. When you construct a building, it means you have exclusive access to its power. This can give you an advantage over others. However you have to be prepared that you might have to sell that building later, and others will gain access to its power. This game makes me feel that life is fleeting and nothing is permanent. It's a zen feeling. You need to be able to let go. 

As the game progresses, there will be more and more common buildings at the centre, and you will have more choices. However not all are good choices. As better and more expensive buildings become available, you don't want to use those weaker ones anymore. So the worker placement remains competitive and tight. 

One interesting challenge is the hand limit of five which is checked at the end of the round. This makes planning challenging. If you have multiple good buildings in hand, you might have to sacrifice some, spending them as payment for the one you decide to build. Or you may have to try to gain cards (including consumer items) early in the round, then spend these cards for construction before the round ends. 

This is a mid-weight game. It is clean and compact. The fun is in maximising your efficiency by making good use of the public buildings available as well as the buildings you manage to build for yourself. There is fun in analysing the game situation and trying to find an effective strategy. As a worker placement game, it does offer something a little different from other worker placement games. 

National Economy was first published in 2015. Two variants were released after that. The latest edition of the game published in 2025 includes all three ways to play. If you enjoy gameplay like this, this is a great deal. 

The Kejap Food Game

The Kejap Food Game is not available for sale. You can get this as a free gift if you visit Kejap Food (a Malaysian fast food chain) and buy MYR 30 or more of food. While stocks last, of course. This is a simple, real-time game that is played in five minutes. It is a cooperative game. You work together to serve as many customers as you can within the time limit. 

Before a game starts, everyone gets a character card. Your card tells you which dice you manage and what role or roles you play. Depending on the number of players, you may need to manage up to three dice colours and you may have up to two roles. Let’s talk about how you serve a customer. 

The first step is taking an order. That just means revealing a card from the deck. You can have at most four active orders. You can’t reveal a new order until an existing one is fully served. An order consists of several spaces for dice in different colours. Everyone prepares food in this game. You are in charge of rolling and placing dice assigned to you. On each order card, all dice placed must add up to 10. This is why you need to keep rolling dice. You will need dice is specific values. When all the food is ready for an order, your next step is to serve the food. Someone is in charge of moving the order card to the next column. This frees up space for that player in charge of orders to reveal a new order card. 

Next, you need someone to clean up. That means returning all the dice on a served order to their respective owners, then flipping the card and placing it in the score pile. 

Everyone has specific tasks to do, and you cannot do others’ work for them. You can scream at them to hurry up but please don’t do that. Just ask nicely. You run a timer before you start the game, and you try to serve as many customers as you can within five minutes. 

I must declare I have not visited Kejap Food before. I received this copy as a gift from the designer Qing Ye. This is a casual game and I would even call it a children’s game. However I played this with a bunch of seasoned hardcore gamers. Well, it was a good filler in between heavy games. The moment we finished, Julian asked me where he could get one. Now this is definitely not a gamer game. It is not designed or balanced for gamers. We finished the order deck in 4.5 minutes. For gamers, this is not about how many orders we can complete in five minutes. It is about how much time we need to complete all orders. We had fun with it. It’s simple and hectic, and it’s perfect for playing with our families and non gamer friends. 

Designer Qing Ye in white

Qing Ye has been more and more active in designing games, and I find that I really like many of his designs. There is one card game originally about Penang shophouses then rethemed to political ideologies which I find very clever. It’s still work in progress. I like the difficulty of needing to collect both item cards and scoring condition cards at the same time to maximise your points. And your cards are also your money to spend on bidding. I’m looking forward to more of his games from Specky Studio. 

Rajas of the Ganges

  

Rajas of the Ganges is a 2017 game from Inka and Markus Brand, who made the Exit series. It was nominated for and won several awards. It was well received by gamers. I wasn't very interested to try it when it was hot, because it sounded like just another worker placement game, with dice. It was suggested at a recent game retreat, so I joined the game. It turned out to be much more enjoyable than I expected. 

This is a worker placement game, and the dice are a resource you often need to spend when placing workers. They come in different colours and they have different values. Some worker placement spots on the board require specific die colours or die values. Your dice are an important resource to manage. There are ways to gain dice, and you want to maintain a healthy number on hand so that you have more flexibility. You need to strike a balance between using dice to get various resources, and replenishing your dice. 

The main gameboard has many worker placement spots, and the score tracks. There are two score tracks, one to keep track of your money, and the other your fame. They go in opposite directions. Zero is at the bottom right. Money increases in an anti-clockwise manner, while fame increases in a clockwise manner. To win the game, you need to increase both your money and your fame so that your two markers meet each other. When I saw this I said hey that's Ark Nova! But Rajas of the Ganges was published earlier, so it had this mechanism first. It is clever. You can choose which aspect you want to focus more on. Actually there is a 2006 game called Gift Trap which has a very similar concept.

Those square tiles below the gameboard are terrain tiles you can place on your player board, which represents developing your own province. One action in the game lets you pick a tile to add to your province. 

When adding tiles to your province, the roads along the edges of the tiles must line up properly. When you are able to connect icons along the edges of your board to your capital (at the top), you gain bonuses, e.g. dice, money, or fame. Certain buildings in your province also help you gain fame or money. 

There is a river on the gameboard, and you can advance your ship along the river. Your ship only moves in one direction. When it stops, you gain the benefit of the space it is on. Ships block one another, and force other passing ships to leapfrog ahead. If you want to move fast, you can choose to leapfrog the others. By doing this, you will skip spaces and miss their benefits, but further down the river the benefits get better. So it is not necessarily a bad thing. 

I enjoy playing the game, but I struggle to articulate why. I think I overestimate how important innovation is in games. Rajas of the Ganges does not offer anything particularly new to me. No surprise, since this is a game from almost 10 years ago. I tell myself I shouldn't be enjoying it so much. I'm always looking for new ideas in games. They excite me. Rajas of the Ganges does not give me anything unusual, but it does give me a well put together package of mechanisms and play experiences. You need to pursue money and fame, and you compete to do so efficiently. There is some engine building to help you score fame and money more quickly by utilising buildings and strengths you have accumulated. There is a constant need to stay flexible. You want a healthy number of dice in hand, so that you have more options. You want to have some karma in hand too. Karma is something you can spend to flip a die to the opposite side. If you run out, you suddenly lose this flexibility. The game is tactical. You must stay alert for opportunities, for example new tiles that get revealed, or river spaces which your opponents vacate, or die values that you roll. There are opportunities for clever combos. Sometimes by performing one action, it gives you something which in turn triggers gaining something else, which then triggers yet another thing. These are satisfying. 

Turn order is important. I certainly felt the need to fight for it. The game gives you some mid term goals. When you reach a certain money, fame or river level, you get to unlock additional workers. Every worker means being able to do more in a round. Unlocking them is something you must deliberately plan for. 

One type of difficult decision I have to make is grabbing a windfall at the cost of losing flexibility for the next few turns. There is something very tempting on the board I can do, but if I do that, I will for example spend almost all my dice. I can get something now, but I know for the next few turns I have to painstakingly gather some new dice. Sometimes I go ahead and grab that windfall. Sometimes I pass. The beauty is I don't have an easy answer for situations like this. These are the juicy and difficult decisions you have to make in Rajas of the Ganges.

A big thank you to J&J! Jon (right) for recommending the game and Julian (left) for teaching the game. Julian completely destroyed us. He was highly intentional in building up fame, and he managed many powerful combos. He also advanced his ship far ahead of us. I had a lot of fun with this game. It's a joy to discover some good older games. 

boardgame shopping in Japan

I visited Kyushu, Japan on a family holiday. Needless to say, being a gamer, I looked up boardgame stores to visit well before the trip, and also took the opportunity to look for games at bookstores, 100 yen shops and such when I was there. I found some games at Don Quijote. Don Quijote is a discount store which sells lots and lots of different stuff. Most of the games I found seemed to be heavily language dependent. So I didn't buy anything. 

The Google Translate app on my phone has been tremendously helpful. I point my camera at the box, and Google Translate does the translation from Japanese to English for me. The translation is decent. I can get a rough idea of the games. This particular game above seems to be popular. It has grown into a series. 

Back of the box

This one has sold 300,000 copies! 

Something to do with marriage proposals

50,000 copies sold! Not as impressive as 300K, but still very impressive.

A game about nasty LINE messages maybe?

This is not a boardgame. This is a map showing merchant ship routes approaching the port of Nagasaki. This is displayed at a museum. When I saw this I immediately wondered whether this could be turned into a boardgame. 

I visited Sunny Bird boardgame cafe and shop in Nagasaki. It was a 4-minute walk from where I stayed in Nagasaki. I did not sit down to play, but I did take a look at the cafe section. They have a huge library. One title that caught my eye was the early edition of Power Grid, when it was still called only Funkenschlag. This was the 2001 edition. The play area is cosy, not big. The cafe is in the city area, so I imagine rent must be expensive. Space is a premium. It's nice to have a boardgame cafe and shop so conveniently located. 

The shop section was not very big, but there was plenty for me to browse. I think there were more Japanese designed titles than foreign designed titles. That was perfect for me. I mainly wanted to look for Japanese designed games. I can find international titles easily in Malaysia. The shopkeeper was friendly and helpful. He recommended me several titles. It took me a while to browse, since I needed the assistance of Google Translate. 

I found a copy of the latest Japanese edition of Ra. I already own one, but Benz had asked me to find a copy for him. Mission accomplished. This edition comes in a pretty small box. It is compact and the price point is low. JPY 2200 is about MYR 55 or USD 13.50. 

These were the games I bought at Sunny Bird. Loop is by a designer from Nagasaki itself, so this is a meaningful souvenir. I bought it not only because of that. The gameplay did intrigue me. Let's see how it plays. I have not played it yet. The third game here is not by a Japanese designer, but the gameplay description is interesting enough that I decided to buy it. 

At one of the malls I visited, I saw this shop selling lots of TCG (trading card game) cards. There were tables for gamers to play. 

The cards were arranged in shelves like this. This might be the norm everywhere around the world, just that I am not a TCG player so I'm not familiar with this sight. 

At a bookstore I visited, I did not find boardgames or card games, but I saw many tarot card sets. I think people use these for fortune-telling or self-help. 

There were sample copies provided to allow shoppers to browse the content. 

Tarot cards is a whole new world I know very little about. 

One Piece version of UNO. I saw UNO with many other IP's attached. 

I saw a shop in Canal City Mall, Fukuoka selling a Gundam TCG

These are starter sets. JPY 1650 (around MYR 42 / USD 10) for one pack. That's quite cheap. I'm assuming one set is sufficient for one player to play. 

These starter sets come with three figurines. 

Player mat for the Gundam TCG

There were people playing another TCG. I wanted to take photos, but I didn't want to interrupt them or make things awkward. I took these quick shots while walking past. That's why the photos are poorly framed. Many players brought their own playmats. The play tables had player guides printed on them. 

We visited several cities in northern Kyushu, and our last stop was Fukuoka. I was pretty happy with the few games I bought in Nagasaki. Although I knew there was a Jelly Jelly Games cafe and a Yellow Submarine shop in Fukuoka, I listed them as optional destinations. If I had time I would go. By the last day, I almost decided not to go. I only changed my mind the evening before we flew back to Malaysia. It was late afternoon. We didn't have plans for the evening. The next morning we would be heading to the airport at 5:30am. Although I was tired, I decided to visit Yellow Submarine. They were still open. 

They are on the third floor of a commercial building. If you don't know about them, you would not discover them by chance. They are a destination store, not a shop you will chance to walk past at a shopping mall. More than half the shop is dedicated to TCG's. They have play tables. However they have a boardgame section too, and for me there is a lot to browse. They too have many Japanese designs, not just foreign designs. 

This is a weird one. It is a game about investigating the colour and pattern of a lady's underwear. I guess this is humour in Japan, slightly risque. In many other countries and cultures this would be inappropriate. 

Love Letter is one of my favourite games. It has a legacy version! Unfortunately this seems to be pretty language heavy. I did not buy this. I wonder whether there will be an English version. 

Back of the box

Trendy is an older game from Reiner Knizia. I have played it many years ago. I absolutely love the cover of the Japanese edition. It looks like a fashion magazine cover. I'm already starting to regret not buying this. I remember the game was just okay. That was why I didn't buy the game. Now that I think about it, this would have been a nice souvenir or memento, even if I don't buy it for the gameplay. 

Back of the box

This is another game I almost bought but didn't. I like the art direction. I looked up reviews on BGG, and most people think it is just so so. 

I find that many games come with English rules. 

I ended up buying 7 games from Yellow Submarine, more than I expected. I didn't go to Jelly Jelly Games after that, because it was getting late, and I was already feeling a little guilty for having gone on a splurge. Ukiyo-e is a design by Michael Schacht. I like his games. This game is originally called Crazy Chicken, later published as Drive. Ukiyo-e is the Japanese edition, and it has a very Japanese theme - Japanese art. This is definitely a good souvenir for gamers visiting Japan. 

There is a game called New Old in the photo above. It looks like two boxes, one new and one old, but this is actually one game. The cover design is done this way intentionally to make this look like two games placed side by side, a worn out copy next to a new copy. 

Later I discovered that Cat Poker is actually Panda Panda. I already own Panda Panda. I didn't know Cat Poker is the original Japanese version. Rikka (六華) - the black box - is by Hashimoto Atsushi, who designed Tiger & Dragon. That was what made me buy it. I really admire Tiger & Dragon. 

By looking at the box cover and the box back of Ult: Coldburning, it seems this is mostly played with numbered cards in different suits. There are some cards with some text, probably scenario cards or something along those lines. I thought this should not be too much work so I decided to buy a copy. 

After opening the game, I realised how wrong I was. This game is fully packed with cards. It has two huge stacks. And guess what, almost half the cards are text cards! See that stack below on the right. I'm going to spend a lot of time translating all those cards. 

If I sleeve these cards there is no way they can still fit in the box. 

Sai Beppu is a superstar in the Japanese boardgame industry. So many games are illustrated by her, and she has such a wide range of styles. I also notice how prolific Kaya Miyano is. He is best known for Trio / Nana.  

I bought three decks of poker cards from various 100 yen stores. I bought one deck because during the trip I had an idea for a game design, and I wanted to playtest my idea with my family. I bought the second and third decks because they looked nice and they were cheap. 100 yen is MYR 2.50 or USD 0.60. The Sanrio deck is cute, and the fruit one too.