Kinapa

Kinapa is an unusual game. I am still not sure whether it's a game I don't like, or a game I don't understand. Many others have played it and found it unique (in a good way). Their comments make me doubt myself. Some who don't like it say it's just like Go Fish, but I disagree about the similarity. In Go Fish you may not lie about whether you have a card. In Kinapa you may. 

Kinapa is a card game for 2 to 8 players. I believe it is designed primarily for 4 to 8, because to play with 2 or 3 you need to use variant rules. The number of hand cards used is always 4 times the number of players, because players start with a hand of four cards. Your goal is to play all four of your cards. All numbers in the game appear twice. What you want to do is to collect both cards of the same value, and then play them to a base. In the photo above there are two cards numbered 13. So that's a pair. There is also a base which shows a fan, and it has the numbers 13 and 14. This means the base can accept a pair of 13's or a pair of 14's. The goal is pretty straightforward. 

The bases are shuffled and placed face-down at the centre of the table. There will be enough bases for all the pairs, just that at the beginning no one knows which bases allow which numbers. The active player (called the emperor) starts his turn by openly demanding a number. All other players must, on the count of three, respond to the demand at the same time. You either raise your hand to state that you don't have the number (you may lie), or you do nothing. There are several possible situations. If two or more players do nothing, then assuming that everyone is honest, the card the emperor wants is with one of these players who do nothing. The emperor picks one of them and randomly draws one of their cards, then give a different card in return. Now if the number of players who do nothing is 0 or 1, whoever has the card the emperor demands must surrender it. If the card comes from someone who has raised his hand, it means he has lied, and he is now caught lying. He will be penalised. Here is yet another situation. The emperor may already have a pair and still ask for that number. If everyone raises their hands, the emperor does not need to swap a card. He just needs to show his pair. 

After the demand step is completed, the second thing the emperor must do is to reveal an unoccupied base. If it matches a pair he has, he plays that pair to the base, and he reveals another base. If the emperor plays his second pair, he wins the game. If he is unable to play, the base is flipped back face-down. You need to try to remember what number it has. This is also a memory game. 

I find reading the rules rather challenging. The rules are hard to digest and remember. I'm not sure whether it's because of the game design or the way the rules are written. I feel the game can be simplified. When teaching the game, I had to look up the rules several times, because I realised I didn't know what to do when I encountered a certain situation. One thing I still don't quite get is this. Isn't it best to always not raise your hand? This way, everyone minimises helping the emperor. Also you won't be caught lying or be penalised for it. The game becomes just the emperor randomly picking someone to swap a card with. Why would you want to raise your hand? Is it because you already have a pair and don't want the emperor taking your card? 

One thing I find annoying is these sheep cards above. Whenever you become emperor, you must take a sheep card too. Anyone with a sheep card may not become emperor again, until everyone has a sheep card and they are then all returned to the centre. This is a mechanism to make sure everyone gets to be emperor once before anyone does it again a second time. Turn order is not clockwise. It is always the current emperor who decides who is next, except he cannot pick someone with a sheep card. Yet another exception is if someone has a fox card but not a sheep card, he must go next. 

The fox cards are the penalty for getting caught lying. This happens in a very specific situation - you have raised your hand, and that turn no one or just one person has his hand down, and you have the card the emperor wants, and you have been forced to surrender it. The penalty is for two turns you play with your hand open. The two fox cards are a countdown mechanism. 

I feel the game has many fiddly rules, making it complicated and hard to remember. I wonder whether they are necessary. Possibly I haven't fully grasped the fun in the game, so I can't appreciate why the rules are needed. I have only played one game, and I didn't even teach or play it correctly. I should play again, and play it correctly, before I draw any conclusion. 

Mass Effect: The Board Game

Mass Effect is a popular console game. It is a third person role playing game set in a sci-fi world. The boardgame version was released in 2024. One of the designers is Eric Lang, the hugely popular game designer who has done many Fantasy Flight Games titles. The other designer is Calvin Wong, a fellow Malaysian. This is like the dream for us Malaysian game designers - having the opportunity to design a game with a world top-level game designer. 

Notice that the box cover has Calvin's Chinese name as well. The publisher took this very seriously. When they decided to put the Chinese name, they did not just use any random font. They contacted the console game localisation company in China and asked them for the official font in the Chinese edition of the game. I admire that they take these production details so seriously. 

I visited Calvin's booth at the Asian Board Games Festival in Penang, where he showcased Mass Effect. I did not sit down to play a game, but I asked him to give me an overview of how the game works. The design direction behind this game is to make something that is accessible to many people. The target audience is fans of the console game. The idea is to get them interested to try the board game version of the game. Many of them may not be boardgame players. Yet. 

The game is scenario based. When you sit down to play, you pick a scenario which has its own map and setup. Regardless of the number of players, there will always be four characters in play. If you have fewer than four players, some of you will play more than one character. Each scenario has its own winning and losing conditions. A scenario does not take too long, so that if you want to, you can play a series of two to three scenarios within one evening. There is a plot line structure which links together multiple scenarios. This creates the experience of playing a campaign. What happens in one scenario carries over to the next. You don't always play with the four fixed characters. There are more than four to choose from so you can try different combinations.

These are some of the characters you can play. Every character has their own character sheet. They have their own sets of abilities and also possible upgrades. 

You get to play these characters.

When a round begins, the start player rolls a whole bunch of dice. Thereafter everyone takes turns utilising three dice. The icons on the dice specify what kind of actions you can take. You take turns executing actions until the dice are used up. This is a cooperative game. You work together as a team to complete your mission.

Calvin Wong the game designer

Cat & Chocolate

 

Cat & Chocolate is a game from Japan first published in 2010. It is an award winner in Japan. This is a party game and it is of the type where you need to be a convincing speaker. This is partly a social deduction game. Players are divided into two teams. You know which team you belong to, but you have no idea who your teammates are. When the game ends, your team identities are revealed, and each team adds up their points to see who wins. What this means is throughout the game you want to do your best to score points, because that will help, regardless of which team you are on. 

Every round, one player will be the storyteller, and the others the judges. As the storyteller, you reveal one situation card from the deck, and you must play one, two or three item cards from your hand which can be used to resolve the situation. You have a hand of only three cards. Your job is to convince everyone that the item or items you play will help you get out that particular difficult situation. After you explain, everyone else votes and this determines whether you score one point. The game keeps going like this, until the game end card turns up. The game end card is inserted roughly in the middle of the deck before the game starts. 

The two factions, and some of the situations

The scenarios are all horror movie type situations. Everything happens in an old mysterious mansion. You have ghosts, monsters, zombies and so on. In most cases you are simply trying to survive an attack. 

When we played, the key question asked by Alex was how were we going to know who was on which team. There is nothing in the rules or game components which will help the players determine who is on which team. It is all up to the players themselves. You can tell others which team you are on. You can lie about it too. This part of the game has unreliable fun, and by that I mean whether it is fun depends a lot on the players. It can be fun, and it might also be boring. In my opinion the designer should do a bit more work to make the fun more reliable. 

If through discussion you manage to figure out who is friend and who is foe, the storytelling part of the game may become pointless. You should always vote yes for your teammates, and no for your opponents. I feel the intention of the designer is you should not figure out your teams during the game. It is only meant for the end-game revelation. 

The game is disappointing to me, especially since this was an award winner. However this was back in 2010, and at that time there probably weren't that many modern games designed in Japan in the first place. Japanese game design certainly has come a long way since then. Cat & Chocolate is that type of party game which depends on the creativity and expressiveness of the players. The kind with performances and judges. Not really my cup of tea. Also the design feels a little dated, now that I have seen many better Japanese games. 

It's a Wonderful World

I have played the other game in the series, It’s a Wonderful Kingdom, which is also a card drafting and tableau building game. That is for two players only. It's a Wonderful World can support more than two. I find both to be rather generic games about constructing buildings to produce resources and then using those resources to construct more buildings. However, there is one aspect which I do enjoy and I find it quite clever.

In It's a Wonderful World, the drafting is simple. You get a hand of cards, and you must select one, then pass the rest to your neighbour. This repeats several times. Once the drafting is done, you’ll have a hand of cards and you need to decide what to do with them. You either place them as buildings to start construction work on, or discard them to gain a resource, which can then be used for constructing buildings. Buildings require different quantities and types of building materials to complete. Some may need as low as just two resources, some can require seven.

Buildings once completed usually produce resources for you every round. Some buildings also give you victory points. The interesting part of the game is how resources are produced. The are five resource types, and they are produced in five separate steps. When you produce the first resource type, you can immediately use these resources to construct buildings. If a building you complete produces the second resource type, then you are lucky. You are just in time to produce that in the current round. This is a fun puzzle to figure out. If you can get the right buildings completed just before the specific production steps, you can get a lot more done. 

There is competition to be the biggest producer in each of the five resource types. When you are the biggest producer, you gain a leader. In this game, a leader is just another resource type, which is worth one point each at the end of the game. No fancy powers. However, some buildings use these as building material, and some buildings give you more points based on your leaders. 

Everyone starts the game being able to produce some resources every round. From these humble beginnings, you need to plan how to grow your empire, and which kind of resources you want to produce more of. Some resources are harder to produce than others. You do need to deliberately plan how to expand your production and which resource types to prioritise. Different resource types will give you access to different types of buildings. The game involves a lot of planning ahead. You want to fully utilise the resources you can produce to construct buildings that either get you points or help you produce even more resources.

I prefer It's a Wonderful World to It's a Wonderful Kingdom. I like the simplicity. It captures the fun of planning your resource production. In It's a Wonderful Kingdom, I did not like the traps and needing to guess whether your opponent has set a trap. It felt rather arbitrary. It's a Wonderful World is a cleaner design. 

Farter Knows Best (屁者先知)

Officially the name of this game is Pizhe Xianzhi, which is just gibberish if you don’t know Chinese. So I’m going to give it my own name - Farter Knows Best. When I came across this game in Taiwan, my first thought was that the Thai farting game made it to Taiwan. That game is Betakkuma’s Fart and Furious. However, upon closer inspection, I realised this was not a retheme, but a completely different game designed in Taiwan. Both the games are about farting in a lift (elevator). Is this an Asian thing or what? I should design a Malaysian farting game to complete the Asian farting game trilogy.

The other Asian farting game which is from Thailand

Farter Knows Best and Fart & Furious play very differently, despite the same setting. Farter Knows Best is a social deduction game and a team game. You need at least five players. Maximum is ten. At the start of the game everyone will be given a secret identity card. This tells you which team you are on. 

These are the various identities in the game. Most of the time you play with just the first row. Most players will be regular passengers, and they are all on the same team. The other team is the farters. The farters have the green balloons. In the photo above you notice that the English translation of the farter is "liar". That's because in Taiwan "farting" is a slang for "lying" or talking rubbish. Depending on the number of players, sometimes the farters don't know who their teammates are. In most cases the farters will know their teammates and they can collaborate. 

The game is played over at most 8 rounds. Your objective is to eliminate the other team, by either voting them out, or having them pass out from smelling too much fart. Everyone starts with a health bar and you take damage whenever you smell fart. There are always more passengers than farters, so the farters need to hide their identities or risk getting lynched. 

The 8 rounds in the game represent the 8 floors the lift will stop at. At four of the floors, nothing will happen. At the other four, someone will fart. The most important concept in this game is that the farter team knows on which floors someone will fart.

These above are the fart and no-fart cards. Among the fart cards, some are regular farts, and some are power farts. There will always be at least one power fart card in play. It's up to you what kind of mix you want to use. Power farts may deal more damage, or they may have lingering effects. 

Every round, before the fart card (I'll call those no-fart cards as fart cards too) is revealed, everyone gets to decide whether to play an action card for the round. This is played face-down. Once everyone has decided, the fart card is revealed. You then resolve the round in turn order. If there is no fart, generally nothing happens. If there is a fart, generally everyone will take damage. Most action cards only take effect when there is a fart. These can protect you, or they can deal damage to others. 

If there has been a fart, you most do a vote to eliminate a player. You can discuss, but voting is done in a simultaneous manner. During discussion, only those who have played an action card may speak. Anyone who hasn't played one must keep quiet. When a player is voted out, the identity is not revealed. Players who are eliminated can check their cards, and they will tell the surviving players whether the game has ended, i.e. all on one team eliminated. 

Drawing cards is hard. You only start with a hand of 4 cards, which is not enough to last you 8 rounds. You need to think carefully when to play an action card. The deep breath card lets you draw 2 cards, but only if no one farts. If someone does, you take double damage. So this is a high risk card. Some other action cards may also help you draw cards, if they are played at the right time. 

Since the farter team knows when there is fart, they hold very powerful information. They know exactly when they should or should not play a certain card. Anyone who happens to play the right cards at the right time, especially when doing this several rounds in a row, will become a prime suspect. 

If you like games similar to Werewolf, this is certainly one to check out. You get all the accusations and reasoning flying around, and here you have more basis for meaningful deduction. Why is she attacking me instead of him? They must both be in the farter team! And he seems to know when exactly to play this card. He must be on the farter team. The identity of the eliminated player not being revealed adds to the challenge of the game, and I think that's a good thing. My friends and I played several games in one sitting, and often the identities of the farters were still being debated when the game ended. 

If you have a large group of casual players, this game works well. Although the game is in Chinese, we are able to play with friends who don't know Chinese because there are only a handful of cards to remember.

One thing I am amazed by is the character cards which come with the game. When I played with my friends, I intentionally left out the character cards. Normally you'd play with them, and they give you all sorts of special abilities. Since my group was all non-gamers, I decided to leave these out. I find the game works just fine without them. Once you know the game well, there is a ton of characters you can play with. Just look at that whole deck of cards in this photo above. So much artwork done! 

Mind MGMT

The Game

Mind MGMT is originally a comic book series. The box cover and artwork of the boardgame look unusual because they are all from the comic series. Certainly not your typical boardgame art. The story in the original comics is about spies with psychic powers. 

This is a cat and mouse game. One player is the recruiter who moves about the board hidden and recruits people. If he manages to recruit 12 new spies, he wins. Alternatively, if he manages to avoid capture until the end of 16 rounds, he also wins. The other players play four agents, and their job is to hunt down the recruiter. The recruiter has four assistants, called the immortals, and they can be used to interfere with the agents' investigations. The locations of the immortals are known. 

This is the game board. It looks messy and intimidating at first, but once you understand all the elements, it is not actually that scary. Well, maybe the art style is still a little scary, but that's being true to the source material. Before the game starts, players take turns to place some red walls. These edges become impassable throughout the game.

The recruiter starts the game by taking several moves. He has a head start and during this time he can already recruit some new spies. He decides where he starts too. When moving, the recruiter can only move one step orthogonally. No diagonal movement is allowed except when you use the bridges around the giant Buddhas (see screenshot above). One important restriction is the recruiter may never visit the same space twice. This presents quite a challenge to the recruiter, because you will have fewer and fewer options for moving as the game progresses. You have to be careful to keep your options open and to not box yourself in to a dead end. By keeping as many options open as possible, you make it harder for the agents to determine your position. You have a single use power which lets you move two spaces in a straight line. This can be very helpful in throwing the agents off your trail. 

Recruiting can only be done in spaces where some specific objects are present. Three types of objects are determined at the start of the game, and they are only known to the recruiter. The board looks very busy, but most of the items on it are actually these objects related to recruitment. In the photo above you can see parasols, coffee cups, billboards, buses, graffiti of a giant eye, swimming pools and so on. Whenever the recruiter recruits, He must specify how many have been recruited. This is recorded on the time track (see the blue track in the screenshot above), and this is one of the clues for the agents.

There are four agents on the board. As they move about, they can perform actions which help them hunt down the recruiter. One thing they can do is to investigate one particular object type. If the recruiter has been to a space with such an object type he must place a footprint token on one such space. A footprint only tells the agents that the recruiter has been here, but it doesn't say when. There is another type of action an agent can perform which forces the recruiter to tell when. This becomes a more precise piece of information for the agents.

The recruiter can use his team of immortals for recruitment, but it is a little bit more troublesome. You need to have two immortals on one particular object type to perform recruitment. Also the object type is known by the agents. Still, if the recruiter is near 12 new spies, then using the immortals is a strong threat. Even if they fail to recruit, the agents would have spent effort stopping the immortals, giving the recruiter a breather.

Every agent has his own unique ability. For example one of them can move an immortal. Another can detect whether the recruiter is within two steps orthogonally. The agent team also has a single use power. This is randomly determined at the start of every game.

The Play

I played Mind MGMT in asynchronous mode on BoardGameArena.com. The first thing I will say is that I think the game will work better as a physical game, or at least played when all players are online at the same time. The reason is this is a game in which you need to keep a lot of information in your head at the same time. If you need to come back the next day to get back into the game, you need to spend a lot of effort grasping the situation again. It is better to play the game in one sitting. This is a game that requires some mental gymnastics. Some people like brainless games, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to let your brain relax when playing games. Just don't ask them to play Mind MGMT with you. You are going to make them suffer. 

In the game I played against Han, I was the agents and he was the recruiter. In the early game it was hard to piece together the clues to determine where he was. There were too many possibilities. However as I gathered more information, I could feel my net contracting. At the same time, he continued to move and he stayed a step ahead. This is the kind of game where you always feel you are just one step behind. The perpetrator has just left the crime scene 5 minutes before your arrival. The tea is still warm. 

It must be exciting playing the recruiter. You never know when the agents will make a lucky guess and get a highly useful clue. You have to plan your route carefully to keep as many options open as possible. You want to have multiple escape routes so that even if the agents track you down to your previous location, there are still multiple branches they need to spread out to to find you. 

There is some psychology in the game. If the agents think the recruiter has probably gone north, because there are more possible paths there, the recruit might just have taken a risk and gone south instead. This is the kind of mind games you will play. 

This above was the end of our game. I managed to catch Han on turn 12 (of 16). At this point he had recruited seven new spies. 

The Thoughts

The hidden movement is a niche genre. Other well known games in the genre are Scotland Yard, Fury of Dracula, and Letters from Whitechapel. Scotland Yard is simpler and cleaner. The others are a little more complicated. Mind MGMT is on the complicated side as well. Both the agents and the recruiter have several special abilities at their disposal. This is a strategy game that uses quite some brain power. Whether you like this genre comes down to personal taste. If you have not tried this genre before, certainly give it a shot. There is much deduction and also some psychological play. Every move by your opponent might be a clue, or a red herring. 

Pax Pamir

Pax Pamir is a compact historical game about Afghanistan. You play local warlords supporting one of the three major powers - the loose local coalition of warlords, the British or the Russians. These major powers compete to exert influence in Afghanistan. You aren’t loyal to any one of them. You just want to be on the winning team when the dust settles. 

You will be buying and using cards in the game. Cards represent various characters and factions. Many of them are associated with one particular region on the map. Having them in play allows you to perform various actions. You raise armies, build roads, and march on those roads to fight.  Depending on which major power you are supporting, you deploy their pieces as armies or as roads. More pieces on the map means stronger presence. There is a type of piece - influence - which does not belong to the major powers, they belong to you. You also want to deploy these because if the strengths of the major powers are close, you score points based no your personal influence instead.

Two rows of cards are available to be purchased. Cards on the left are cheaper than those on the right, so players will tend to buy from the left and then cards will be shifted leftwards, dropping in price. Cards on the right are effectively a preview of what is to come. They allow you to plan ahead. There are limits to how many cards you can have in hand and in play. You need to buy and play cards in specific suits to increase these limits. So this is another challenge the game poses to you. 

What factions, characters and actions become available in each game depends on the order cards are drawn. You will be competing with other players to grab a combination of cards which work well together. The feeling is you are somewhat at the mercy of situation, i.e. history. You are going to learn much about this period in the history of Afghanistan. The option to switch support is interesting. If your current win condition is difficult to achieve, you might as well try something else.

Those thick discs are your influence pieces

Like other games in the Pax family, this is a game about manipulating the board situation to fit one of several possible end conditions. It is not a game about accumulating victory points. 

My game ended quite abruptly, while I was still trying to fully figure out what was going on. this is not a simple game. The board and the pieces look minimalistic, but it is quite a challenge to manage the cards you are going to buy and play. Your most important actions come from the cards you are able to play. Despite the simple structure, the game is complex because most of the details are on the cards themselves. You need to manage your tableau of cards. You also need to be aware of what your opponents can do.

I need to play this game again because I am still figuring out the strategy. 

Malaysia Design & Play Game Design Competition Finalists

The 2025 Malaysia Design & Play Game Design Competition is organised under the Malaysian Boardgame Design banner, and MBD is a loose and informal group of local game designers, game publishers and game enthusiasts. I have participated in several game design competitions as a participant, and this is my first time being on the organising team of one. The main organiser is Jon from nPips Games (Furmation of Rome, King & Peasant). We have 6 judges and 110 contestants signing up, and that means quite a bit of work for us judges. The submission date was end of July. In the first stage of the competition, contestants must submit a 2-minute video giving an overview of the game, and the rulebook. Judging was based on just these two elements. 

The original plan was to have 8 finalists entering the second stage. However we had a tie. Several games around the 8th position had the same score. We discussed how to decide which to stay in the Top 8 and which to eliminate. Eventually we decided to go with the Top 9 instead of the Top 8. 

Our objective in organising this competition is to encourage more Malaysians to try their hands at game design, and to elevate game design in Malaysia. With more people doing it, we will push one another to get better. We will learn and grow together. We hope Malaysia will produce more and more good game designs, and achieve international recognition for our games. In the past few months we have been encouraging our contestants to share, learn from one another, and support one another. We organised playtesting sessions at different states across the country. In our WhatsApp group we encouraged everyone to share their rulebooks for feedback and suggestions. When we have a healthy community, one which is willing to share and help one another, we will grow faster and learn faster. 

Every contest entry is scored by at least three judges. After we completed the first round of judging, we ranked all the games, and we arranged for those near the top to be scored by more of us. Some of the entries were scored by all six of us. When we scored the games, we also gave our feedback and suggestions. Whether they made it or not to the final round, we wanted to give quality feedback to help all contestants learn and grow, and become better designers. 

This was my first time being a judge in a game design competition. At the moment we have only completed stage 1. Next we are going to play all the finalists. The two main criteria for this competition are (1) Malaysian theme, and (2) at most 52 cards. When I did the scoring, I found that I can easily tell whether a contestant has done much game designing or game playing. Those who are less experienced tend to use a handful of common game mechanisms. Their designs tend to fall into just a few familiar types. The more experienced game designers, or even just game players, will have some interesting twist or at least some original idea in their games. 

I came across some entries which are mostly based on other published games. This is a game design competition, so there is an expectation of originality in the game design. If a contestant takes an existing game and attaches a Malaysian theme, that's not game design. That's localisation. The general principle is clear, but in actual execution this is not always simple or easy. Let's take trick-taking games as an example. How original does one need to be for it to be considered original enough? If a game uses mostly the mechanism of another game, but one new aspect is added, is this considered original enough? As we get into the nitty gritty, we realise this is not so simple. Also we as judges have not played every game in the world. There was one game I quite admired, but I later found out that it was mostly based on a digital game. We the judges had to alert one another of theme. It helps to have the six of us, because we have different experiences in playing games. Collectively we have a much wider exposure. 

In Stage 1 the scores we gave was from 1 to 7. 4 means okay, nothing special. 5 means worth giving a try. 6 means yes I'd like to play this. 7 means I want to sign this game. We did have some games getting 7's. Let's see whether one of them eventually becomes the champion. Of our Top 9, their scores were all 5.5 or higher. They are all games which most of us judges are keen to play. 

One thing I am quite impressed by is how much work many contestants put into designing their games. Many of the videos, rulebooks, game components and game art were done very well. AI was used by many, and it was used appropriately. Art and video don't get you any points, but they do help in explaining how the game works. For many contestants the output was a labour of love. I believe going through this whole process of designing, playtesting, producing, rule-writing and iterating has helped the contestants learn and grow. 

Now the finalist games will be delivered to us judges, and end August / early September we will be gathering to play them, and doing the final judging. The final results will be out mid September. Below are our Top 9 games, in no particular order. Congratulations to all who made it to the Top 9!  

Links to the video introductions and rulebooks below: 

• Awake En - Botanical Grabber （video）（rulebook）
• Lim Feng Keat - Gotong-Royong （video）（rulebook）
• Tang Hoe Ching - Malashion （video）（rulebook）
• Rasis - Rentak Wau!（video）（rulebook）
• Ray Tan - Teh Tarik Game（video）（rulebook）
• Jeixel Heng - Twin Towers（video）（rulebook）
• Jason Sondoh - Kandar Klash!（video）（rulebook）
• Anas Maghfur - Batik（video）（rulebook）
• Kenny Goh - JAM!（video）（rulebook）

Collection snapshot July 2025

The last time I took a photo of my game collection was 2016. For the past nine years I don't feel I have bought many games. My game collection has not changed significantly. I generally don't trade or sell games. Only in the past few years my game purchases increased a little. That is because I have now become a game publisher myself and I have been active in the local game industry. I go to boardgame fairs. I now buy games for reference and for collection, and not only because they are games I think I will love playing. I'm buying not as a gamer, but also as a designer and publisher. 

If you compare the 2025 and 2016 photos, you will find many similarities. Now I am running out of space for boardgames. I think I need to initiate a purge. I need to find some opportunity to sell games. Probably I will give some away to friends. But first I need to decide on the purge list. I remember doing this some years ago and that purge list turned out to be much shorter than I expected. It is just difficult to part with your loved ones, even the ugly ones.

Jan 2016

Jul 2025

My shelves are obviously pretty full now. Compared to 2016, you will notice that many games are still roughly where they used to be. However I do have some new games now.

I keep some empty boxes because I use them for my game design work.

It feels wrong to roll up the maps for Carcassonne Maps like this and stick them into the shelf in this  unceremonious manner, but I cannot think of any better way to store them.

I bought Samurai Swords and Axis & Allies (1984 edition) before I became a boardgame hobbyist. I bought them when on a work trip to the USA. That was in the late 1990's. 

I now leave a spot for my camera. I often take photos when I play games because I use these photos at my blog. So the camera is part of my boardgame hobby. Some games here belong to Han or Allen - Architects of the West Kingdom, Undaunted, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, and this version of Unlock which features popular boardgames. 

I invested a lot into that box of Netrunner at the bottom right. I have packed many expansions into this box. I have been wanting to get into the game system, and I have made several attempts, but I was never able to persist. So I am still a beginner. Yet I cannot bear to part with it. 

I have several Alea titles here. Also several games in the Mystery Rummy series. I am now desperate enough to squeeze games into crevices among my games. I quite like that small box game Seven! and I feel a little guilty sticking it in a crevice like an afterthought. 

Here you see many small box card games.

My games fight for space with other household supplies. Daybreak is stuck under tissue paper. At the top right I still have several unopened Netrunner expansions, called data packs. I think I have only played the Food Chain Magnate expansion once. What a shame. It's a great game and the expansion comes with many modules. 

These are the more recent games. Some are from the Essen game fair last year - 2024. I am buying more card games and small box games nowadays. I have also been buying party games. This would have been unimaginable for me 9 years ago. 

My downstairs offshoot is still there. Many years ago I placed some games there which are suitable for children, so that I could easily pick one up to play with my children. At the time they were still in primary school. Now they are in university. These games have not yet migrated back to the main collection space, because I don't have enough space. 

This is not my game collection shelf. This is my home office. When I work at home and I need to conduct online training or attend online meetings, I sit in front of this shelf. This shelf was deliberately arranged like this to be presentable. When having Zoom meetings I prefer to have a real background and not a virtual one. It feels more authentic and personal. I intentionally placed a few boardgames. They can be good conversation starters.

If the person at the other end of the online meeting says they have played Twilight Struggle, then I know this is a gamer. Not many people ask me about Twilight Struggle though. The game people ask me about most frequently is Lord of the Rings. Because they think it is the book.

My home office is just one of two new offshoots compared to nine years ago. The other new offshoot is this to-play pile. These are the games I need to remind myself to play and write about.