Asian Board Games Festival Penang 2024

 

I will be showcasing my games in Penang at the Asian Board Games Festival 20 - 21 July 2024. Who's in town? Come visit me and I'll teach you how to play in person! My booth will be on the Ground Floor.

Easy Breezy Travel Agency

The Game

Easy Breezy Travel Agency is a quick card game for 2 to 4 players. You are travel agents, and you collect travelers to form trip groups. Whoever makes the most money from organising trips wins. 

The game is set up like this. The 4x4 grid is a ticket price chart. The four columns represent price, from $1 to $4. The four rows represent four destinations - Miami, Chicago, New York and New Orleans. The cards within the grid are drawn from the four small stacks on the left. These are the transportation cards. They can be buses, trains or planes. Different modes of transportation carry different numbers of passengers. The positions of the transportation cards indicate the ticket prices. Prices always start at $1, but they can go up to $4. 

The four face-up cards on the right are the passengers. Some passengers want to go to a specific city. Some (I think of them as cheapskate backpackers) are happy to get a free ride anywhere. In this game you collect passengers, and when you get enough to fill the bus / train / plane, you claim the transportation card and make money (score points). How much you make depends on the number of paying passengers and the ticket price at the time. Backpackers help you fill seats if you struggle to get enough passengers. Just remember they don't pay. 

A turn is very simple. The available actions are straight-forward. What you will do most frequently is to take a card from those four face-up on the table. Each time you take a card and refill the pool, the new card from the deck may specify a price increase for one of the four destination cities. When this happens, you update the grid at the centre of the table, advancing the relevant transportation card. 

When you have enough passengers, you will be able to perform the second type of action, which is to claim a transportation card. You discard the passengers and you score points. You keep the transportation card for game end bonus scoring. A new transportation card for that destination will be drawn. It is priced at $1. The game end scoring is based on whether you have collected many transportation cards of the same city or mode of transportation. You will score more points if you collect many cards of the same city or mode of transportation. 

You may have at most four cards in hand. If you have more than that, any surplus is placed before you on the table. The cards are still yours, just that they are vulnerable to attack. Now the third thing you can do on your turn is to reorganise. As part of this action, you may place cards from your hand onto the table, you may force opponents to swap cards with you twice, and then you may take cards back into your hand. This is where the "attacking" happens, and where the concept of unprotected cards comes into play. Anything you have on the table in front of you are at risk. 

Each city card stack in the game has only three cards, of the three modes of transportation. So there are only 12 city cards in the game. The game ends when one city card stack runs out. This is something the players can manipulate. 

The Play

This is a light and quick game. Most of the time you are collecting passengers. You need to accumulate enough to claim the transportation cards. It is a race, and at the same time you hope to time the claiming of the transportation cards when the ticket price is the highest. There is a little brinkmanship here. Buses take two passengers (no more, no less), trains three, planes four. You can see what passengers your opponents have collected, so you know who are competing with you. Whether to use free riders is not always an easy decision. If you are desperate to grab the transportation card, you may have to resort to using them. Even when you will be missing out on points. Some points is better than having an opponent take the card before you can, or the game ending before you manage to take it. Yet, maybe if you wait for just a little longer you can get the right paying passenger, and that will give you a bigger profit. 

Whenever anyone takes a transportation card for a city, the next card to come into play always starts at $1. So if you miss cashing in at a higher ticket price, your passengers will suddenly devalue. 

The game end situation can be exciting. When you have enough passengers to claim the last transportation card of a city, do you do it immediately? If you are obviously leading then it's a no brainer. But if you are not exactly sure, it's not so simple. Do you let the game go on a little bit more so that you can score more points? But will that also allow your opponents to score even more? 

 

I have an ideal situation here. I have four paying passengers who want to go to Miami (yellow). The plane tickets to Miami are at $4 now, the highest rate. I will be able to score $16 at one go. However in case someone else claims the last Chicago (red) transportation card, the game would end before I can score my $16. 

The Thoughts

This is a light and breezy card game, just like the game title suggests. The rules are simple, but they create some interesting situations and decision angst. I find it an enjoyable filler. 

Pie Factory

 

The Game

Pie Factory is a light card game about making pies. The cards in the game are ingredients. There are three types of ingredients - crusts, fillings and toppings. Pies can be just the crust (probably not very interesting), or crust plus filling, or crust, filling and topping. You score points by completing pies and selling them. The game ends after you go through the deck twice. 

This is a 2-player game in progress. The two cards on the right determine player order. Player order is checked and can change every round. On the left there is an assembly line of cards. You can take cards from this assembly line. 

You only perform one action on your turn. You can play a card from your hand, play a card from the assembly line, draw a card from the deck to your hand, or box pies. Playing a card means adding it to a pie or starting a new pie. You can work on at most three pies at the same time. If you already have three, you will need to box them in order to be able to work on a new one. To start a pie you will always need a crust. Fillings can be put on crusts. Toppings cannot be simply added to any filling. The toppings only go well with specific fillings. 

The text and icon at the bottom of the card indicate what ingredient it is. The icon at the top right corner indicates what it can be placed on. In the photo above, the card on the left is a crust, so there is no icon along the top. This means you can play the crust directly onto the table as a new pie. The card in the middle is a topping. Along the top right corner you can see that the meringue topping only goes well with lemon, lime or chocolate fillings. The card on the right is a filling. So in the top right corner you see that it must go on top of a crust. 

The point value of a pie (when you box it) is the dollar value of its topmost card. When you box a pie, you score it, putting the top card in your score pile. The other cards go to the common discard pile. 

When you take a card from the assembly line, you must immediately play it. If there is no valid play, you can't take the card. Only some of the leftmost cards in the line are free. To claim the rightmost card, you must discard two cards from your hand. For the middle cards, you need to discard one. During a game round, if a player takes a card from the assembly line, the assembly line is not immediately refilled. This is only done at the end of the round. So player order is important. The early bird can get the free cards and also have more options. 

When refilling the assembly line, the cards are first shifted left to fill any gaps. Cards are then drawn from the deck to fill the rightmost spaces. So newer cards will be more expensive. 

The player order of the next round is determined by cards played in the current round. There is a preparation time at the top left corner of the cards. Whoever has the shortest preparation time gets to go first next round. If you do not play a card, i.e. you draw from the deck, or you box pies, you automatically go last next round. 

Some cards have an icon at the bottom left. This is the area majority aspect of the game. There are three main icon types - presidents, foremen and secretaries. At game end, you compare who has collected the most in each category. This gives bonus points. The icon in the photo above is not the secretaries. It is the grandma. This is a special card. If you have the grandma, during the president reckoning, you may convert one of your presidents to a foreman or secretary. 

The Play

The game is generally simple. The art is lovely. I found the change in player order every round tedious. The game procedure feels unnatural and unwieldy to me. When you play a card, you can't directly put it on your pie. You have to set it aside first, because after everyone has played, you need to compare prep time to determine the new turn order. I played many rounds and couldn't get used to the round procedure. It felt convoluted to me. When you pick a card from the assembly line, it must go directly into play, but when you draw a card from the draw deck, it goes into your hand. This may be a small difference, but I got confused and it made the game feel non-intuitive to me. 

You want to make pies of high values, and that means you want to make pies with crust, filling and topping. This seems to depend a lot on the luck of the draw. If a topping appears but you don't have the right filling, you are out of luck. You can't take the card into your hand, since anything you take from the assembly line must go into play in the current round. 

I can appreciate the importance of player order. You get more options, and you are more likely able to get a free card. In our game, we often had few or no cards in hand. That limited our options. First we couldn't take those cards from the assembly line which required discarding cards. That means we could either draw from the deck, or take the free card. The free card was not always playable, which meant we couldn't take it. Then we were left with just the blind draw. Maybe I just played poorly and I shouldn't have allowed myself to get into a situation with no cards in hand. 

Taking a card from the assembly line allows you to put a card into play with just one action, compared to drawing from the deck to your hand and then playing it from your hand, which is two actions. Instinctively, taking a card from the assembly line is the better option. It has double the efficiency. However when you have no hand cards, you can only take the free card, which severely limits your choices. Spending two actions allow you to do some planning and saving up of good cards. The cards go through your hand and you can do your strategising. However the cards are blind draws. Then you are dependent on luck. That doesn't seem fun. 

During play, you have to keep in mind the area majority competition - collecting cards with customer icons. The points from these are significant enough that you can't ignore them. 

My score pile at the end of a 2-player game.

The Thoughts

Unfortunately this is a game I doubt I will play again. The art is nice. It's a generally simple game. However I find the gameplay unintuitive and tedious for the amount of fun I get out of it. It also felt restrictive and it didn't allow me to plan or strategise much.