Thursday, 10 July 2025
Let's Go! To Japan
Wednesday, 9 July 2025
Dancing Queen is back in print!
Tuesday, 8 July 2025
boardgaming in photos: Rebirth, Whale Riders, Regicide, Lost Ruins of Arnak
My copy of Rebirth is a special memento, because it is a signed copy. I had queued for about an hour for Reiner Knizia's autograph at the Essen game fair 2024. I had played a demo copy at the fair before I bought my own copy. Since returning to Malaysia, I did not play my own copy for more than half a year. I only managed to get it played recently. Younger daughter Chen Rui and I did a two-player game.
The board is double-sided. One side is Scotland, and the other Ireland. The Scotland map is easier, so we started with that, since Chen Rui had not played the game before. Since it was a two-player game, some areas of the map had to be blocked off. We used the red player tokens for this.
Playing Rebirth again made me appreciate the skill and art of the master. What you do on your turn is deceptively simple. You are just placing that one tile you have in hand. Its type restricts where you are allowed to place it. You don't have a plethora of options to give you analysis paralysis. The game moves so briskly that I feel rude to pause to take photos. Despite the apparently simple choices, you do have to think strategically. This is not a game of maximising individual turns. You have to think about your long term goals and how to maximise your end game score.
When I taught the game, Chen Rui asked, "Is this like Carcassonne?" My first reaction was, "What?! That can't be. This is obviously more like Through the Desert." However when I thought further about it, I realised she was probably right. You draw a random tile every turn, and what tile it is limits where you can place it. In Through the Desert, you get to choose whichever camel you fancy.
Sunday, 6 July 2025
MESOS
Saturday, 5 July 2025
Pinocchio is released!
Friday, 4 July 2025
Orleans
The Game
Orleans is a bag-building game from 2014. That was an era not long after Dominion the pioneer deck-building game was released in 2008. Bag-building, mechanism-wise, is the same thing. It’s just that the physical components are different. In Orleans, instead of cards in a deck, you have chips in a bag. Poker chips, not potato chips. Chips are workers of different types. Every round you draw a number of chips from your bag and use them to perform actions. Once they are done, they go back to the bag.
One aspect of the game is a map showing towns around Orleans. You have a pawn on the map and you can travel about to claim goods and to build trading posts. Goods are worth points at game end, and trading posts too.
The game is played over 18 rounds, and events happen every round, sometimes causing trouble and sometimes presenting opportunities. That’s another aspect you have to handle.
The Play
The game gives you many strategic options - which kind of workers to go for, any buildings which you want to get, how do you travel on the map, which of the tracks to pursue. It’s interesting to manage your pool of workers. You want to tune your worker mix to best serve your strategic direction. Sometimes your needs change and you need to tune again.
Competition comes in many aspects. You race to grab buildings. On the tracks there are spots offering citizens (which help with map scoring) and you need to race to grab them. Movement on the map is a race too, because there are plenty of goods tiles to be picked up by whoever passes by first. There is a finite number of workers of each type. It is possible that they run out and you can't recruit any more. That's another thing you race for.