Tales of the Old Fort (勇闯旧城记)

 

This is a game I bought at the Kaohsiung City Museum in Taiwan. Tales of the Old Fort is the name I give it, an approximate translation of the original Chinese name. I bought this game more as a souvenir than as a boardgame. The old fort refers to Zuoying, a district right next to the city of Kaohsiung. This was a military base, from the Ming Dynasty up to the Second World War. Tales of the Old Fort is real history being presented in boardgame form. 

Back of the box

Game board

Action cards

These character cards are used only in the advanced rules. There are two modes of play. In the basic mode, you play a cooperative game. You construct the walls and the buildings together, and do your best to survive the historical incidents. As a team you try to score as many points as possible. The advanced game is competitive. Instead of working together on a team score, you have individual scores. You score points in different ways, and you win by scoring more than everyone else. 

Event cards

There are four types of building materials. They must be built in the right order - green, grey, yellow then red. You can skip some of them, even directly going to red. However there is a game mechanism which discourages you from doing too much skipping. 

These are some of the buildings you need to construct. Grey means not yet built, and orange means completed. The requirements for constructing a building are in the bottom left corners of the building tiles. The requirements are in the form of what the two adjacent wall sections must be made of. The game board is divided into four quadrants, and each quadrant is adjacent to two wall sections. To construct a building, you don't need to pay resources. You just need the two adjacent wall sections to fit the requirements. This is why you will often be constructing walls without skipping colours. 

Here you can see the player pawns, a gate, damage tokens, and an era token. Event cards in the game are generally bad. Usually you get attacked from one or more directions, and the enemies attack at specific strengths. If the walls are not strong enough to repel the attackers, they get damaged, and buildings in the fort may get damaged too. Damaged walls have zero strength, and when a wall piece takes a second damage token, it is destroyed. Damaged buildings score no points. You need to repair them to remove the damage tokens. 

Box front

A game is set up like this. You have the four gates, but no walls yet. All fourteen buildings are placed in their designated quadrants, with their not-yet-built side showing. 

You set up four sets of event cards. The lighter back cards are regular events, and the darker back cards are major events. Each game you will use all the regular events. There are two or three major events for the four eras in the game. You randomly pick one for each era face-down, so you don't know yet which one it will be. 

This is one part of the game I want to complain about. The setup rules say four stacks of regular event cards, but the game comes with regular event cards of only three eras. There are no Era 4 regular event cards. I checked the component count section of the rulebook, and it says 18 cards. There are indeed 18 regular event cards, six each for Eras 1 to 3. So I believe this is an error in game and product design, not in manufacturing or packing. My solution is I divide the regular event cards into four decks as evenly as I can. 

You draw an event card whenever you construct a building. So you should prepare yourselves well before constructing buildings, i.e. get some walls up first. There are four large buildings in the game. When you construct one, you draw a major event card, and you also proceed to the next era. That means the next time you draw a regular event card, it comes from the next deck. These regular event cards will have stronger effects. Brace yourselves! 

Your have a hand size of two action cards. The action card deck is a countdown mechanism. If it runs out, the game ends. This is just one way the game ends, and this is the bad way. It means you run out of time. Normally you want to end the game by constructing the last large building and triggering the final major event. 

Most actions in the game require playing or discarding a card, and then drawing one. You have some time pressure to get as much done as possible before the deck runs out. Player pawns can only stand at the gates. Depending on which of the four gates you are at, you can work on either of the walls next to the gate, or buildings in the two quadrants next to the gate. If you want to move to an adjacent gate, you have to discard a card. Cards are mostly building materials, with a few special action cards which only take effect if you discard them for movement. To use a building material card for building or upgrading a wall, you need one action to place the card next to the wall site, and then another to actually build. Repairing a wall or building costs one card. Ironically constructing a building doesn't cost any card. You just need to make sure the wall type requirements are met. 

When I first read the rules, I did not have high hopes. I had a nagging feeling this was amateur. It didn't seem like a game made by experienced gamers. The rulebook was not clear on several things. Now that I have played the game, it is not a complex game, but when I first read the rules, I felt I kind of know how to play, but I wasn't 100% confident. 

I played with my daughters Shee Yun and Chen Rui. I thought the game was going to be a breeze, but we failed pretty spectacularly. The first building we constructed was a large building, because it had a special ability. This meant triggering a major event, and it also meant progressing to the second era, where the event cards are stronger. Needless to say, constructing that large building was a horrible move. We weren't thinking straight. We were overly keen to construct buildings with powers. We found out the hard way that this is a game about raising walls and preparing yourselves well before you construct buildings and allow events to happen. Events only trigger when you construct buildings, which means you can delay them. 

We had tons of damage tokens on the board. We also found out we played several rules wrong. Perhaps I am partly to blame, because I am not used to reading rules in Chinese. Most of my games are in English. However there are certainly some parts where the rulebook and the components are ambiguous. For example some cards say the attack is from "west / north", and some cards say "west north". Does that mean in the former we get to choose? Or does it mean I must pick whichever is worse? We encountered a few situations where we couldn't find a clear ruling, and we had to decide ourselves how to interpret the rules.  

Since we had a horrible first game, we decided to go again. Now that we had learnt our lesson, we did our planning better. We knew where we could expedite wall construction to skip some levels, and we knew where we should keep some basic walls for a bit longer. We delayed constructing buildings as far as we could, so that our defenses were stronger. The game is not as easy as I had originally expected, but now that we understood it, we were able to do quite well, and with ease. We have kind of solved it now, so it doesn't offer much further replayability. However I have yet to play the advanced rules, so maybe that's worth checking out. It becomes a different game because it will be competitive and not cooperative. 

Some parts of the game are interesting. This is not just a random assortment of common game mechanisms. Buildings being constructed for free, only depending on the adjacent wall type, is certainly something I haven't seen before. There is a spatial challenge in how the quadrants are positioned. Buildings in a quadrant are dependent on two walls, but these two walls are attached to two different gates. If you want to construct these two walls quickly, you need player pawns on both the gates. 

Most buildings have no function other than being worth 1 point. Only large buildings have powers. Two of the large buildings let you build a regular building for free. That's something you can plan around. 

I don't like that it is too easy for players to control the events. You can just hold off constructing buildings. There is no imminent threat. Yes, the dwindling deck is your time pressure, but being able to control when events happen is, in my opinion, too powerful. I'm saying all this from the perspective of an old timer. The game might be too easy for old gamers like me, but I'm probably not the target audience for this game. For normal people, the difficulty is more appropriate, and the game will have better replayability. Well, at least I still got two games out of it. It was still a puzzle I needed some effort to work out. I may still get more plays out of the game by trying the competitive version. Come to think of it, designing a cooperative game is actually very difficult. For experienced gamers, it needs to be pretty hard to ensure replayability. For casual gamers, you can't make it too hard because it would be disheartening. 

Tales of the Old Fort is a nice memento. The game components are atypical. The game mechanisms too. The buildings in the game are all based on real buildings in Kaohsiung and Zouying. The events are historical incidents. I'm grateful it gave me time with my children to explore its mechanisms. That's something worth celebrating. It is like having played an escape room game. You may not be keen to play again, but you've had fun. Next should be the competitive mode. 

There is a Tian Hou Temple in Kuala Lumpur (Temple of the Heavenly Goddess). There is one in Zuoying too. The one in KL was where I did my registration of marriage in 2000. 

BIGF 2025 - Bangkok International Game Festival

The Bangkok International Game Festival (BIGF) is happening in Thailand 29 - 31 Aug 2025! I am not exhibiting there myself, but Pinocchio and Snow White and the Eleven Dwarfs will be there, via my collaboration partner Choon Ean of LUMA. If you are in Bangkok, please visit the fair! This will be the debut public appearance of Pinocchio in Thailand!

Apiary

Apiary is a game with an unusual setting. It is set in a distant future when humankind is extinct. Bees are now the dominant intelligent species, and they are going into interstellar expansion. This is a worker placement game. One interesting part is how your workers will grow, and as they grow bigger, they become stronger. Eventually they will grow old enough to retire, and retirement is mandatory. So during the game you have to remember to birth new bees to replenish the workforce. 

Overall, this is yet another game about collecting resources and then spending them to buy stuff, and stuff you buy score points based on various criteria. The worker placement rule is a little unusual. Each area has limited slots, but they never stop you from placing your worker. You can always place a worker. When you do that, previously placed workers are shifted right or down. If there are not enough seats, the one which has been around the longest will be pushed off the seat, i.e. first in first out. And that's a good thing. If your bee gets expelled this way, it grows, and it returns to your hand. That means you can now deploy it again. 

Storage is a challenge, because there are five types of resources, and your storage slots are for specific resource types. You need to make sure you have enough space for all five types. Also, you may have at most four workers at the same time. 

To claim a yellow tile (which scores points at game end), you can only use a Level-4 worker bee. This action is called Carve. 

This is your hive. Every player has a unique tribe with its own special powers. You start your hive with a large base plate on which you already have some hex tiles. Space on your base plate is limited, and once it is full, you cannot further expand your hive. You need to add base plate extensions before you can add more tiles. 

In some cases the position of a tile has an impact, for example a tile may score points based on how many farm tiles are adjacent to it. So you have some spatial element here. 

The green tiles are the farm tiles. They produce resources and they are also your storage space for these resources. The red tiles have single use powers when placed. The yellow tiles score points at game end. Another type is blue. Blue tiles give you a permanent special ability. 

You get to collect cards. A card can be used in three ways. It can be discarded as a single basic resource (which is not a very efficient way of using the card). It can be played for a one-time ability. It can also be used as a game-end scoring card. Slots are limited to use cards for game-end scoring, so you need to consider carefully which ones to assign to these slots. 

Apiary is a complex and heavy strategy game. There is a lot of text to read, which I find a little tedious. I think it's an interesting concept having workers which grow and become stronger, affecting what they can do and how well them do them. Generally you keep collecting resources and spending them to get stuff. This is the typical Eurogame so there is nothing particular new about the resources and buying stuff with them. During the game you can collect several scoring conditions and you do your best to fulfil them. This is a game with multiple ways to score points. One more thing which is interesting - if you run out of storage space and are forced to discard resources, you earn the queen's favour. If you get a lot of the queen's favour, it can translate to many points at game end. So sometimes it's worthwhile to deliberately plan to waste resources. 

I've never really clicked with games from Stonemaier Games. Their games are hugely popular, and I can appreciate why. It's just that they don't match my personal tastes. Most of their games are heavy Eurogames. Not that I don't like this genre. I do, but I don't find new ideas or mechanisms in their games which excite me. They do know how to pick interesting themes - birds in Wingspan, alternative history mechas in Scythe. Apiary, about bees in space, is certainly something I've never seen before. If you are a fan of Stonemaier Games, chances are you will like Apiary, because this is very much their style of game. 

Stupor Mundi

Stupor Mundi was the name given to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and it meant the wonder of the world. He was an industrious and forward-thinking leader. In the game Stupor Mundi you play vassals of the great leader. You build your own castles and develop your own kingdoms, while at the same time you can influence Frederick’s progress in building his castle.

This is your player board. You have a site for building your own castle. There are two types of construction material - grain and stone. You will be producing, buying and selling them throughout the game. Completing different structures give you different benefits. Building walls increases your storage capacity. Completed wall sections, i.e. wall plus the towers at both ends, generate income every round. Towers give you space for recruiting allies, and allies give you points every round based on specific criteria. Building sections of the keep gives you strong powers, one of  which is being able to perform 6 instead of 5 actions every round. 

The action system is interesting. This part of the game is a deck-building game. You have a deck of 10 cards, and every round you will draw a subset. On your turn you play a card to perform an action. That card must be inserted into one of the slots below your player board. If a card is played face-up, you perform the action on the card. If the card is played face-down, you perform an action on your board. If you look at the screenshot above, the card back (yellow) shows two soldiers holding spears. The icons these spears point at are the options you have. I find this clever and also funny. I imagine the two soldiers muttering, yes sir you can do this, and this. During the game it is possible to buy action cards. This is the deck-building aspect. Cards you buy will be stronger than your initial cards. 

This is the main board, showing five different port cities. On your turn you always have the option to sail or to stay. Ports offer different rates for buying and selling goods, different allies, and different action cards. If you want to sail far, you need to pay extra. Trading is important. Selling high and buying low is an effective way to get the resources you need for construction.

This is Frederick's castle. This somewhat simulates a player board. How much money, stone and grain Frederick has can be affected by the players. The construction progress too can be influenced. One funny thing about this game is you can undo his construction. Thankfully your own construction progress does not get undone. Players want to break down Frederick's walls and towers mainly because of the allies. Some allies score more points if the player has more of a certain structure type than Frederick. So if you have that ally, you want to tear down the boss' structures. But if another player has that ally, you want to help the boss build quickly to prevent your opponent from scoring more points. Sad to say this, but the boss becomes a tool and a victim in office politics. 

Frederick's status changes through edicts, those tiles on the right. Certain things that players do allow them to issue edicts, and there are always three to choose from. Edicts specify which aspects of Frederick's castle you can change, and usually you get to choose whether to increase or decrease. 

This is a board for specialists. Every player has some, and Frederick has one too. Some actions allow you to advance a specialist. Depending on where they are, you gain certain privileges, for example scoring points whenever you recruit an ally. When your specialist moves to the next space, you lose the privilege on the previous space. However the spaces on the right are usually more powerful. Frederick doesn't actually make use of his specialist. It is there just to see whether the players have a stronger specialist than him. Again, this is related to ally scoring. 

I find Stupor Mundi fascinating. I would classify this as a development game. Generally you are producing resources, and also buying and selling them, so that you can afford to build structures. Completing your castle is your main storyline. What I find interesting is the many ways you can enhance your abilities. Different structures you build will give you different strengths. Which ones do you go for first? Do you work towards unlocking your 6th action as soon as possible? Do you try to get some allies quickly and milk them for points as early as possible? Do you invest in better action cards early? I like how the many elements are closely integrated. If you want to buy and sell efficiently, you must build walls in order to increase storage. Choosing where to slot an action card is not always easy to decide. Using a slot means reducing your action options for the rest of the round. 

The specialist advancements is fun to manage. It's a timing puzzle. If you think you will be doing a certain action a lot in the next few rounds, it will be best to have your specialist on a space that gives you a discount or a bonus when you perform that action. 

You don't directly attack your opponent, but you will be competing for allies and action cards on the main board. Since you can influence Frederick's status, you want to do it in such a way that you deny your opponents from scoring the full points from their allies. Manipulating Frederick's status is not something you get to do often. If you can deny your opponents, it will usually be a pain for them to change the situation back to one that's favourable to them. You need to consider carefully which allies to take. You don't want to spend a whole lot of effort only to find that your ally is quickly rendered useless. 

I was nasty and did my best to disable Han's allies. See the red crosses above three of his four allies. 

By late game we both had all our towers and walls built, but we did not complete our main keeps.

Our game ended when we ran out of edicts. We fooled around with our boss' castle so much that it was in shambles and he had no money left, just a large stockpile of unused stones. So much for being the wonder of the world when he had such corrupt and scheming vassals. 

Stupor Mundi is largely in the mould of the heavy Eurogame. You score points here and there. You collect resources and spend them to build something. However I find the package as a whole brilliant. It keeps you agonising about putting together enough resources for the next construction. There are many ways you can improve your capabilities, and you have to prioritise which ones to go for. There are tactical opportunities to pursue, but which ones do you want to commit your time and energy to? There is a constant struggle between wanting to do things which improve your abilities, and wanting to do things which get you points.  

Monster Taiwan （妖怪台湾）

Sometimes when I buy games, in particular those from lesser known brands, I try to guess how experienced the game designer and publisher are based on the game design, the rulebook, and the overall production of the game. Yes, sorry, I’m judging people. With big brands, you can always expect a high level of polish, because these guys are experienced. With lesser known or unknown brands, it’s like doing a lucky draw. Sometimes you find interesting and bold ideas. Sometimes you question the design decisions. Sometimes you see tell-tale signs of inexperience. Sometimes it is the thrill of this kind of lucky draw that makes me buy a game.

Monster Taiwan is from Taiwanese publisher TWOPLUS and they have been around since 2008. This is a game with much local flavour. It introduces many monsters and ghosts from Taiwanese folklore. The monsters are not necessarily malevolent. Sometimes people use them to do evil, but sometimes people use them for good. As human society advances, we believe less and less in monsters and ghosts. When humankind gradually interacts less with the monsters, they become forgotten. This is the key message in the game. I feel the monsters symbolise part of traditional culture that is becoming lost. 

Some of the monsters in the game

This is a dice drafting game played over four rounds (seasons). Every season there are five monsters accessible to players. If you activate them, you get to use their powers. You can draft dice to place directly on monsters. Monsters have limited slots for dice and the slots require dice of specific values. You can also draft dice to your own player board, which is your village. At the end of every round, there is a strength comparison and scoring for all three terrain types in villages. Another thing you can do is spend dice from your village to activate a monster. This weakens your village, and also it’s a two step process compared to directly placing a die from the dice pool to a monster, but there is one important benefit you gain when you do this. You get to claim one of only two tokens associated with that monster. Tokens will be worth points at the end of the game if the monsters are not forgotten. 

The dice tray has slots for five monsters around it.

The player board

If die colour matches terrain, score 1 point.

This monster reduces green die values

This monster steals a victory point

At the end of every round, two monsters least activated will be forgotten, i.e. discarded and replaced. Their tokens are worth nothing now. Monsters which survive all four rounds are worth many points. Those which only appear in the final round are worth much less. 

The markers for the four seasons indicate how long a monster has been in play.

Monster tokens

Another way you score points is by fulfilling missions. They require that you have dice in your village of specific values on specific terrain. Some missions instead of giving points grant an additional ability. For example the rightmost mission above gives you a virtual brown or blue die of value 1. You can use this virtual die to fulfil future missions. 

When contemplating whether to buy the game, it was partly the dice which made me decide to buy. I thought in the worst case if I disliked the game, I could try to design my own game using these pretty dice. 

I did a two player game with Chen Rui. I find the game a little problematic with just two. This is because every monster has two tokens. If we both activate the same valuable monster, then we neutralise each other, and this aspect of the competition becomes pretty boring. You always make sure you invest in any monster which looks like it will survive. Maybe with two players one token needs to be removed. Then the players will have meaningful competition trying to disqualify monsters the other player has invested in. 

Overall, I didn't find the game interesting. You try to score some points by fulfilling missions. You try to populate the different terrains in your village more than your opponents. You want to activate monsters to attack your opponents, to help yourself, or to invest in them and keep them in play. This is a perfect information game, since everything is open information. 

Planet Unknown

Planet Unknown is a game about exploring a newly discovered planet to see whether it is going to be habitable by humans. This is a polyomino game in which you try to fill your own player board. Polyomino tiles are laid out on a Lazy Susan which is rotated every turn. You always have two pieces before you, and you must pick one to place on your planet. The game ends when one player is unable to place either of his options. 

A tile you pick always has two colours. These colours let you advance on the corresponding technology tracks. There are five such technology tracks. When you reach certain positions, you get some benefit. Benefits include victory points, special abilities, free advancements on another track, and so on. If there are specific tracks you want to focus on, you will tend to choose tiles with those colours. 

The different tile colours have different characteristics. Red tiles often let you move your rovers. Rovers are used to get rid of meteors. Some tiles come with meteors, and if they are not removed, they make their spaces unusable. Removed meteors give points. Blue tiles are quick in giving you points, but only if they are placed on water terrain. When advancing on the green track, one benefit you can gain is single square tiles which help tremendously in filling your planet without leaving gaps. 

At the end of the game, complete rows and columns score points. Meteors and barrels collected score points. Advancements on technology tracks as well. Although the game is mostly solitaire, there is one aspect where you will compete with other players. There are several bonus scoring criteria. If you fulfil the conditions better than your opponents, you will score bonus points. This influences how you plan in filling up your planet. You will probably choose to fulfil some and concede on others. Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Those icons along the top refer to the bonus scoring criteria.

One-time benefits when you reach certain points on the black track.

I really enjoyed the experience of playing Planet ‎Unknown. I find it soothing and satisfying. You can plan a few turns ahead which tiles to take and how to fill your board leaving as few gaps as possible. What tiles and colours become available to you is subject to luck. You don’t always get what you want. However, you can still make the most out of what you are dealt. It is mostly a solitaire game, and usually I prefer games with more player interaction. Yet I find this game a joy to play. It is a rewarding experience to see all the pieces fall in place.