After Us

After Us is a game with The Planet of the Apes vibes. Humanity has collapsed, and now apes are starting to evolve intelligence and develop a new civilisation. 

This is a deck-building game, and the cards are used in a clever way. Every turn you draw four cards and must arrange them in a row with their sides touching. Cards have complete and incomplete boxes. Complete boxes give you resources or let you do certain things. Incomplete boxes are on the left and right sides of the cards. They give you resources or let you perform actions only if they are matched up with another incomplete box on the adjacent card. This is why the order you arrange your cards is important. You need to decide which half boxes to combine and often you need to sacrifice some of them. Some half box combinations allow you to convert one resource to another or to points. How you want to form the combinations depends on your strategy or situation. 

As you gather resources, you can spend them to buy new cards. In game terms you are recruiting new apes to your tribe. There are four ape types and they are generally better in a specific area. Gorillas help you remove weak cards from your deck. Mandrills help you score points more efficiently. Orangutans help you collect batteries which can be used to activate human artifacts. These are special powers randomly set up for every game and they are available to all players. Chimpanzees allow you to reactive powers already used in the current round. They are flexible. 

Ultimately your goal is to reach 80 points. This is when the game ends and whoever has the most points wins. As you tune your deck, your ability to score points improves. Managing your tempo is important. You need to be watchful for when the game might end. If you take too much time perfecting your deck but someone else goes quick and dirty and barely hits 80, you will lose because your engine is not ready. If you are going for quality, you need to make sure you can hit 80 in the same round as your fastest opponent. At that point if you have developed a strong tribe, you will outscore your rivals. 

This is a mid weight strategy game. It is mostly deck-building, the twist being how you need to line up your cards. I like that it brings a new idea to the table. 

Pirates of Maracaibo

Pirates of Maracaibo (2023) is the card game version of Maracaibo (2019). I first played Maracaibo only earlier this year, and I greatly enjoyed it. Finally I found an Alexander Pfister game which I truly liked (the game is also designed by Ralph Bienert and Ryan Hendrickson). Despite being a card game version of its older brother, don't think of Pirates of Maracaibo as a simple version of the game. It is not at all simple, and I would still consider it a heavy game. Not even a mid-weight game. The main thing that's missing compared to the original is the three major powers - the English, French and Spanish - and how you need to support one of more of them. However in Pirates of Maracaibo you get to collect and bury treasures instead, which is actually a little similar mechanism-wise. The card game is just the original presented differently using different mechanisms, but most of the elements are still here. This is not a game for people who want a simpler game. It is for people who like the original, and want something "same but different". 

The board is made up of cards and the setup is random every game. You can even use different shapes for the board. The game is played over three rounds. Every round the players will sail from left to right. You are allowed to move up to a certain number of steps, and every turn you must move to a new space at least one column to the right of your current column. You may move further if you want to. When anyone reaches the shore of Maracaibo on the right, the next turn will be the last for everyone before the round ends. If you are too far behind, you might not reach Maracaibo in time to enjoy its rewards. 

On your turn, you sail to a new location and use it. Sometimes you get to buy that card, and it becomes your equipment. When you do this, a new card will be drawn to replace the one you have just bought. In some cases you can't buy the card and you just use the ability provided. Some islands let you pay a large sum to enable a game end scoring condition. At some islands you can build your own black market, which gives you a benefit the next time you visit the same island. 

This is the exploration part of the game. When you advance your pawn here, you get to enjoy the benefit on the space you land on. The further you progress, the bigger the rewards. When the game ends, you score points based on how many rivers you have crossed. 

There are many possible upgrades at your ship (i.e. player board). They are divided into four levels. You can only access Level 1 initially. Only after you have surpassed certain numbers of upgrades will you gain access to higher levels. 

During the game you may collect treasures. They can be gems, gold or pearls. Their point values can be manipulated, so you need to balance between collecting them and manipulating their values. One action you can do is to bury treasure. Doing this can give you benefits. It just feels right to be able to bury treasure in a pirate game! 

The cards you buy enhance your abilities and encourage you to specialise. You will want to plan your strategy around your strengths. During the game you get to collect mission cards too, and they also drive your strategy. Each mission card has two levels. You already score points if you achieve the first, but you will score more if you achieve the second too. How players develop their abilities and which missions they pick will drive them in different directions and give them different priorities. 

Like its predecessor, Pirates of Maracaibo offers you many opportunities to customise your abilities. You will be unrecognisable by the end of the game. You will have many tools, ship upgrades, and black markets. You will have a set of missions which will differ from your opponents. I would argue that this is actually a relatively peaceful game. Sometimes you do compete for the same things. Manipulating the values of the treasures can affect your opponents. However you will be kept pretty busy customising your own abilities and completing your own missions. If you want to play competitively, you should watch your opponents. If they are doing too well, you can take deliberate actions to disrupt their plans - going where they plan to go to force them to pay more, or buying what they need. When I played I was mostly busy with my own business and I didn't pay much attention to others. I will need to play more to get to a higher level of play. I greatly enjoy that sense of power seeing how much my humble pirate enterprise has grown throughout the game. 

Praga Caput Regni

Praga Caput Regni is a heavy Eurogame which tells the story of the city of Prague, in particular during the middle ages when many of its important buildings and infrastructure were constructed. Players produce resources - stone, gold and eggs (yes, eggs) - and use them to construct walls, buildings and the king's road. There are many things to do and many ways to score points. 

The core mechanism is this wheel on the right. Six action tiles are attached to notches along its edge. Every action tile has two halves. On your turn you must pick an action tile and decide which half to use. That will be the action you perform. Depending on where that action tile is positioned on the wheel, you may need to pay money (the red section), you may gain points (the blue section), and you will gain some benefit (the icons in the inner part of the wheel). The wheel is rotated at the end of your turn. All action tiles become cheaper to use or offer victory points if no one has picked them for long enough. The action tile you have just used goes to the most expensive notch before the next player's turn. 

This is one of your player boards, called the action board. The central bit is just a tiny reference section to remind you what you can do with silver and gold windows. The six hexes around that represent the six action types in the game. One of them is to produce stone or increase your stone production. Another action works the same way but is for gold. The next three actions are for the three structures you can construct - wall, building and the king's road. The last action is placing an upgrade on this action board. When you have an upgrade, you gain some benefit whenever you perform that upgraded action. 

The game board is busy and intimidating. When you construct a building, you place a hex tile onto the board. Buildings give you immediate benefits. They may allow you to contribute towards constructing the cathedral. They may also allow you to place an influence cube. Influence cubes are used for claiming benefits from surrounded plazas. Whenever a plaza is surrounded by buildings, it awards prizes to players who have influence cubes next to it. 

On the top right of this screenshot above you can see three types of hex tiles. The first row are upgrades which can you get for your personal action board. The second row are walls you can construct around your action board. The third row are buildings you can construct on the main game board. 

When you build the king's road, which runs through the city, you don't place any tile. You just advance your pawn along the path. Every time you advance, you have the option to spend resources to get something else. You want to make sure you have some eggs ready, because eggs will get you good stuff. According to legend, eggs were used in the mortar for the bridge at the end of the king's road. 

This is the other player board on which you track your production level for both stone and gold, and also the quantities in hand. Quantities are tracked using those two wheels. When the quantities exceed certain levels, the planks protruding from the wheels will knock those influence cubes off, making them available to you. You also get different bonuses for exceeding these thresholds.

These two tables track your contribution towards the Hunger Wall and the cathedral. Your marker starts in a corner and you want to move it towards the opposite corner. Moving up requires silver windows, and doing so gives you points. Moving sideways requires constructing certain wall and building tiles. Moving sideways increases the value of Hunger Wall or cathedral tokens you collect during the game. 

There is quite a lot to digest before you can play this game. So many different mechanisms! You have 16 actions for the whole game. You may get more if you are able to collect silver and gold windows. 16 actions is not a lot. There are so many things to do. You need actions to upgrade your production levels, and separate actions to perform the actual production. There are many things you can construct, and you have to choose. It is impossible to do everything well. You have to choose some aspects to maximise. 

I feel this is a theme-first game. If I were a tourist visiting Prague, this would be a great souvenir because many important historical structures are covered. Of course, the average tourist wouldn't be a heavy boardgamer, so I can't imagine this being sold at a museum. I find the game highly enjoyable. I like how there are many opportunities to plan clever moves. When you select your main action, often it also allows you to gain smaller side benefits. These smaller benefits do add up, and you can use them to support you in whichever main strategies you want to pursue. Being able to orchestrate these small benefits to amount to something bigger is satisfying. 

Living Forest

Living Forest combines two game mechanisms - push-your-luck and deck-building. Story-wise you are spirits protecting the forest from evil forces. There are three ways to win. Plant enough trees, or put out enough fires, or form a long enough chain of flowers. 

Everyone starts with the same deck of cards. At the start of your turn, you will reveal cards from your deck one by one. Five different icons can be found on the cards, and they correspond to five different actions you can take. Cards are divided into day cards and night cards. You can keep revealing cards from you deck for as long as you want to accumulate as many icons as you like, but once you get the third night card, you must stop. Getting the third night card is bad news. Normally you can perform two actions on your turn, but if you have three night cards revealed, you may only perform one action. So this is the push-your-luck element in the game. Once you have the second night card, you need to make hard decisions. You don't necessarily decide to stop drawing only after your second night card. If you already have enough of the right icons you want before that, you can decide to stop. 

One of the actions you can perform is to summon an animal. That means buying a card from the market. This is the deck-building part of the game. A newly purchased card goes to the top of your deck, so you will draw it on your next turn. When you buy cards you augment your deck. There are also ways to remove cards from your deck. Another type of action you can perform is to plant trees. The number of tree icons you reveal determines what kind of tree you can plant. You plant in your own 5x3 forest grid. Some trees give you benefits. Completing rows or columns, or planting at specific spots, give you benefits. Some of these benefits are one-time affairs, while some are ongoing effects. You always start planting from the central tree. How your trees spread outwards depends on which kinds of benefits you want to pursue. 

Whenever anyone summons an animal, there will be one fire added. If fires are not put out, they hurt everyone. You will be forced to add fire cards to your deck. They are night cards so they will force you to stop drawing cards. You need to have enough water icons to perform the action of extinguishing fires. 

Another thing you can do is to move your pawn along the stone circle. Everyone has a pawn here. Whenever you advance, you gain the benefit at your landing spot. The benefits are mostly other action types in the game. Normally on your turn you may only perform each action type just once. However if you use the stone circle, you can perform the same action a second time. Whenever you overtake someone else's pawn in the stone circle, you get to steal a discount token from them. Everyone starts the game with three discount tokens, one each for the three win conditions. That means in the beginning you don't actually have to reach 12 to win in any of the three conditions. You just need 11 fires put out, or 11 trees, or 11 flowers. If you manage to steal discount tokens from others, you can further reduce the requirement. Of course, if your discount tokens are stolen, then you can only to win when you hit 12. 

Forming a chain of 12 flowers is the corner case win condition. This is the equivalent of shooting for the moon. This is not something you can see concrete progress for, like putting out fires or planting trees. This is all about whether you can reveal 12 flower icons within one turn. To achieve this you must manage your deck purposefully. This sounds like you need a fair bit of luck, but there are certainly things you can do to increase your chances. You probably don't want to buy many night cards. Going for the flower strategy can be risky. By focusing on flowers, you will be sacrificing other icon types. Flowers themselves don't improve your abilities, unlike trees. 

I was a little OCD when playing, in that I refused to buy night cards. This may not be a wise strategy, because night cards tend to be powerful. I have not explored this aspect of the game - utilising night cards. I feel buying some night cards is viable. I do enjoy buying cards. I like making my deck stronger. However I realised a problem when I played. Han was extinguishing fires at an alarming pace. I realised I should have paid more attention to player order and who would get to extinguish fires first. I should not have done my animal summoning without considering the consequences. 

One situation that can occur is getting most of the icons almost equally. That's bad news. You can perform at most two actions on your turn, which means you will use at most two icon types. Other icons you draw are all wasted. If there is something you have planned to do, do you insist on drawing cards until you get enough of the icons you want? Or should you change tact if you happen to draw many of another icon? This can be tricky! 

I like that the game has three distinct win conditions. I think you probably need to pick one somewhat early and focus on that, so that you can concentrate your resources around it. However it may not be easy to make this decision early. You may still need to observe how the game situation develops. Planting trees improves your abilities, so even if you don't intend to win by trees, you probably should plant some. 

I won by getting to 12 flowers. I fell behind in extinguishing fires. I didn't have an advantage in planting trees. So I decided to gamble on flowers. Thankfully I had been OCD about not buying night cards. That helped with the flower strategy. 

I admire and enjoy Living Forest. I don't always say both about a game. Sometimes it's one but not the other. I like that the various aspects of the game are closely related. The three win conditions are distinct, but indirectly they are linked. You don't directly attack your opponents, but there are several ways you compete. You summon animals from the same pool. Summoning animals creates fires, which can be both problem and opportunity. The race around the stone circle can become intense. The push-your-luck element itself is exciting. I like that there is harmony between the game mechanisms. They feel like a natural and coherent whole, with nothing out of place. 

Tekken: The Boardgame

Tekken is a well known arcade game franchise. It is a one-on-one fighting game. The boardgame version is coming soon, and a digital implementation is already available on boardgamearena.com. This is a two player game. You play three rounds and you win the game by winning two out of three rounds. The basic premise is simple. You defeat your opponent by reducing his health points to zero.

The two fighters are represented by figures on a small board made of hexagons. You have a hand of three cards. Whenever you play a card, you will draw a new one. There is a concept of initiative. The player who has the initiative will be attacking, and the other will be defending. When you play a card to attack, the card can be of one of three types - high, middle or low. Your opponent tries to block the attack by guessing which type it is. If he fails, your attack card takes effect and you get to attempt a subsequent attack. You can attack up to three times this way before your opponent gets the initiative. 

Deciding how to block is not arbitrary, at least not entirely. If your opponent has played a card, that card may be linked to the next card. It can give him an extra attack if the next card is a specific card type. So he has incentive to play those, if he has them. Now you have to guess whether he is going to make use of that bonus, or maybe he will sacrifice that bonus so that you will not guess his next move. Some double guessing and reverse psychology can come into play. A successful attack can be a hit, which means reducing the opponent health points, or a push, or a move. There is some positioning in play in the small battle arena. 

This card lets you move twice and push once.

Characters have unique abilities. When playing specific combinations of cards, they can make extra attacks. There are special moves which allow you to make unblockable attacks, or to make an extra attack before being forced to surrender initiative. You have several tools at your disposal.

I must admit when I played the game, I was figuratively speaking button mashing. I did not quite grasp the intricacies of the various possibilities. I just had a vague idea. I feel the game is more strategic than I know how to play it. I don’t think I am fully utilising the strengths of my character. One-on-one fighting games are not really my thing. I did not spend enough effort to learn to play it properly.  For me, it was mainly hoping my opponent didn’t guess right when I attacked, and hoping I guessed right when I was trying to block. If you like this genre, you may get more out of it. 

boardgaming in photos: OnStage, Biblios, Cafe, Sky Team

I played OnStage with my daughters Shee Yun and Chen Rui. This is a trick-taking card game from Vietnam, designed by Michael Orion. This was not my first time playing, so it didn't have that first play lustre any more. But it is still enjoyable. I like how the trump suit can change even in the middle of a trick. The 1, 4 and 7 cards which manipulate the actors can be very powerful when used at the right time. 

3 flowers mean big shot celebrity

Minor starlets standing in the shadow

I played the Unseen expansion of Innovation again with younger daughter Chen Rui. This Fortune Cookie card is so powerful! Granted, you need to have a strong empire to be able to use it. You need at least seven of one icon. 

I remember doing badly in Biblios when I last played it, so I was a little surprised that I won this recent game. Near the end, I calculated my strength in each of the colours I had, and I wasn't confident I would win many, because I only had absolute majority in one of the colours. When the game ended and everyone's cards were revealed, I was pleasantly surprised that in some colours where I wasn't strong in, Chee Kong and Jon did even worse. So I won some of the colours I didn't expect to. 

I played a physical copy of Cafe in 2022. I don't remember it being anything extraordinary. I thought it was okay and not very memorable. However when I played it online recently, I found it quite enjoyable. Normally I enjoy a game more when playing the physical version. Maybe it was because I didn't quite remember the game and had to relearn most of it, which meant rediscovering the tactics and overcoming the challenges again. These felt satisfying. I didn't do so well in the early game. I did have a big connected patch of farms, and also a big connected patch of drying areas, but I didn't have any big group of roasters. Roasters became my bottleneck. It was challenging to get out of that. 

I played several online games of Sky Team with Han. We tried different airports, i.e. different scenarios, including Kuala Lumpur. Some scenarios come with additional rules and challenges. Sometimes we were unclear about these rules and that led to disaster, getting people killed when we crashed our plane. Sky Team is a fun game and brings something new to the table. 

Oriflamme

Oriflamme is a short card game of secrets and bluffing. Everyone has the same set of 10 cards and each card is a unique character with its own power. At the start of the game, everyone randomly removes 3 cards from his set. This means there will be variation in everyone’s hands. You don’t know exactly which cards are in play and out of play. 

During the game, players add cards to a common row. You always add cards to one of the two ends of the row. You add your card face down, so that others do not know what it is. After everyone has added cards, you do a round of execution. From left to right, the owner of every card decides whether to reveal the card and use its power. A revealed card can be activated to trigger its power, while a card that is still hidden will have a 1-point token added to it. 

Some cards can be used to attack and remove other cards at specific positions. However, some cards are traps so if you try to attack them, the owner gets a benefit instead. Some cards simply help you gain points more efficiently. Some cards manipulate the positions of cards which can affect the abilities of other cards. You play until everyone has played 6 cards, and the game ends. 

There is a fair bit of guessing the intentions of your opponents in this game. On average, a face-down card earns one point per round. You need to do better than that to defeat your opponents. It is through making the right guesses and the right attacks that will get you ahead. 

Oriflamme is a light and quick game. It is a melee and it is everyone for himself. 

Looot

Looot is a game about Vikings looting goods and bringing them back to build their own villages. Players are all in the same raiding party, but you are from different villages so whatever you manage to grab first is for your own village only. You have your own player board on which you place the items you bring back. While you raid, you can claim objective tiles to place on your board. If you manage to surround them with the right items, you will get to score them. However if you fail you will lose points.

On the main board where you raid by placing pawns, you start on the coast and expand inland. A new pawn can only be placed in an empty space next to a landing site or another pawn, either your own or an opponent’s. You are working together on this raid after all. It’s just that you don’t share the loot. For some of the items, you claim one when you place a pawn on it. For some, you claim when when you place a pawn next to it. For watchtowers, you need your pawns to connect two of them in order to claim a pair of items. 

On your personal board there are some preset structures you can build. You need to place specific items next to them to complete construction and score points. These structures are basically objectives you are trying to fulfil. Throughout the game there will be a selection of objectives you can claim to place on your board. They work in a similar way, except if you fail at these voluntarily claimed objectives you will be penalised. 

The palace requires many items to build

An item placed on your board can count for multiple adjacent objectives. Make use of this well and you will be much more efficient in scoring points. 

One interesting aspect of the objectives is they increase the values of items you collect. All item types have a default value, and they are scored at game end. If you find that you are collecting many of a particular item, you probably want to get objectives which increase the value of that item. Gourmet class mutton anyone? 

You have several single use powers, e.g. allowing you to place a pawn in an occupied space, or claiming two items instead of one. These can be life savers in case you get stuck in a bad situation. 

Looot offers a pleasant play experience. It can totally be rethemed to kids raiding a candy house. You have goodies all over the place up for grabs. There is a fair bit of planning involved. You want to claim as many objectives as possible so that you’ll score more points. It is a fun spatial puzzle trying to maximise the items you loot to fulfil multiple objectives. Claiming objectives is also about risk management. In case you fail, you will lose points, and that can be painful. You have to watch out for yours and your opponents’ pawns running out. That is when the game ends and you don’t want to be caught unprepared. I enjoy the market manipulation aspect of the game. Boosting the value of items you collect can be highly lucrative. 

Malaysian Holidays postcards are released!

My fifth published game will be Malaysian Holidays, and this is a collaboration project between Cili Padi Games and Specky Studio. This time I am just the designer, and they are the publisher. 

The whole idea for this game came from two things. First, I had wanted to design a game which could be widely accepted in Malaysia, i.e. something which non-gamers would like. I wanted to find a topic which many people would find interesting. Gameplay needed to be simple and easy to grasp. If I wanted to make a game sell well in Malaysia, this was the kind of target audience I should aim for - the non-gamer. The second thing was what made me pick this topic for such a game. On social media I sometimes see people plan for holidays for the following year. They check which days of the week the public holidays fall on, and identify long weekends, and also potential long stretches of holidays that can be created by taking one or two days of leave. For example if a public holiday is on a Tuesday, you can take the Monday off to create a four-day stretch. Malaysians like to make use of these long stretches to go back to their hometowns, or to go somewhere else for holidays. We have many public holidays, because we are a multicultural country. We love our public holidays. Every time the national football (soccer) team wins some tournament, or a national badminton player wins some trophy, people will start asking whether the prime minister will announce a special holiday. I'm sure fellow Malaysians can relate to this. All this led me to decide to turn Malaysian public holidays into a game. 

The design and development journey has been promising and encouraging. Non gamers and casual gamers quickly get hooked. Once when I visited an educational books publisher to pitch one of my other games, I brought several of my other prototypes for showcasing my portfolio. When they saw my crude prototype box, which was a brown cardboard box for food sachets and only had "Malaysian Holidays" hand-written on a plain white sticker, they picked it up and asked what's this? And we ended up playing it immediately. Malaysians love public holidays! It's in our DNA! That lousy box had no art at all.

After Buddhima from Specky Studio and I agreed on our mode of cooperation, he engaged Lim Chi Qing from Sunny Day to create the art for the game. This is a project which needs a lot of art. We feel that every public holiday in the game should have its own art. So this was a lot of work, truly a labour of love. I really like the art style Chi Qing used. The game itself is not yet published, but the art is now made into postcards, and they are now available. If you want to order some, please reach out to Specky Studio: link.

Coffee Rush

Coffee Rush is a family game from Korea about running a busy coffee bar. Customers order drinks, you collect the right ingredients to make those drinks, and hopefully you can serve them their drinks before they lose patience waiting and storm off. You will get more and more customers and inevitably someone will eventually have too many upset customers. That’s when the game ends and you compare points to see who wins. This is a game about people who have not had their morning coffee attacking you like zombies until eventually one of you gets overrun by the horde. The game can also end when the card deck runs out, but that would not be as cinematic. 

Everyone has a player board where your orders are tracked. New orders are added to the top row. When you complete an order, it is removed from the waiting zone and put face-down in a score pile. Every round outstanding orders are shifted one row down. If an order is shifted beyond the bottom row, it means the customer loses patience and walks away, while giving you a one star review on Google Maps. You lose 1 point. 

You get new orders when either of the players before you in turn order completes their orders. You get a new order for every order they complete. This is why the orders keep piling up. The tension keeps rising as you play. 

On your turn you move one of your pawns up to three steps on the ingredients board. You can pass through other pawns but may not stop in the same space as another pawn. You collect ingredients for every space you enter, and you can place them in any of your three cups. This is how you complete orders. 

Who ordered caramel caffe latte? 

Whenever you have three or more completed orders, you can trade them in (they are worth 1 point each) for an upgrade. An upgrade is worth 2 points, so doing this means you are sacrificing 1 point. Upgrades give you new powers, for example collecting more ingredients and being able to move diagonally. 

Coffee Rush is easy to get into and immediately relatable. There is some competition and blocking on the ingredients board, but it is not vicious. You are busy enough handling your own customers so you probably won’t bother with blocking others much. Anyhow you can only block the final landing space. Others can still pass through your space. The more effective way of attacking your opponents is probably completing multiple orders at the same time and giving them more orders than they can handle. Still, they just might manage, and score points for those orders. 

This is a nice game to play with casual gamers and it will also work as a gateway game.