clearing my game collection

For a long-time gamer, my game collection is not very big. I rarely sell games, because I find that troublesome. You need to take photos, count components, pack and post the games, or arrange to meet for COD. I'm too lazy to go through all that hassle. So my collection only grows and rarely shrinks. In 2020 I did one round of giving away games. I gave some to friends who were interested in the games. For some games, I feel if the chances of me playing them again are low, I'd rather give them to friends who would play them. An unplayed boardgame is a sad boardgame. In 2020 I also gave games away through a Malaysian Facebook community of boardgamers. The games I offered were all quickly claimed. I did have two conditions: you need to pick up the game yourself, and you will play it within a month and take photos of you playing it for me. I later realised that even making all those arrangements for people to come pick up the games was tiring. Many of those who took games did play them and send me photos. What was disappointing was some did not keep their word. I lost faith in humanity a little. So I no longer want to give games away to people I don't know. This time round, I made the first offer to friends, and they have claimed several titles. Of what remains that I want to get rid of, I will sell them as-and-when it's convenient for me, e.g. certain boardgame events when people can inspect and pay on the spot. I set a price not for the sake of making money. I just want people to appreciate the games. People have a bad habit of not valuing what they get for free. 

Many of the games I'm giving away or selling have been in my collection for many years. I feel a little sad to see them go, but I feel happy that they are going to people who will play them. 

 

Sat 16 Aug 2025 the Magic Rain team organised All Aboard Bites at Lalaport in Kuala Lumpur. Their flagship boardgame convention is All Aboard, and All Aboard Bites is a smaller scale public gaming event. It's a much more casual meetup. I went as a participant, just to play games. I brought some of my prototypes to be playtested. Several of the finalists of the Design and Play game design competition were there, and I played Twin Towers, Jam and Teh Tarik Game. I brought my own games (games I bought, not games I designed) - Yspahan and Municipium. I wanted to play them. However during the event whenever I was about to start a game, we usually had five players, but both these games support at most four. So I didn't manage to get them played. 

Of my own designs, I playtested Malaysian Holidays and Rebels of the Three Kingdoms. I continued playtesting the two-player variant of Malaysian Holidays. By now it is pretty stable, and I don't think I will make any more changes. It has remained the same after several playtesting sessions with different players. A slight downside is it is a little different from the 3- to 5-player game in how you choose cards. The holiday cards and taking a trip work the same way. Only the card choosing mechanism is different. 

This playtest session for Rebels of the Three Kingdoms was encouraging. When we were done and I started packing, the group asked to go again. That's a good sign. We had a dramatic end to our first game. In the late game, Kenny was the obvious leader, and no one wanted to team up with him because that would help him score points and reach the winning threshold. We all wanted to force him into the weaker alliance. When it was time to choose an alliance, he was completely isolated. We had a 4 vs 1 situation. Normally under such a situation the smaller team will lose. It's simply too big a gap. However, the four of us were careless and forgot one important detail - Xiahou Dun. This character, when facing an enemy alliance of double the size, helps his alliance win immediately. Kenny revealed his character, and it was Xiahou Dun. We should have been on the alert for this. When 4 of the 5 unused characters were revealed earlier that round, there was no Xiahou Dun, and we should have been wary that it might be in Kenny's hand. 

I received one good feedback from this playtest session of Rebels of the Three Kingdoms. One question raised by the playtesters was why Chen Gong? In history, Chen Gong was a strategist serving under Lu Bu. In the Three Kingdoms novel, he is a secondary character. I picked him to be one of the 10 characters in the game partly because I had Lu Bu, and partly because I was influenced by the Japanese manga Soten Koro / Beyond the Heavens. In the manga, Chen Gong still is a secondary character, but he left a lasting impression on me. Now I have decided to swap out Chen Gong, and swap in Zhou Yu. Chen Gong was character #1. From the gameplay perspective, when character #5 Sun Quan is in the same alliance as character #1, Sun Quan's strength would double to 10. Making Zhou Yu #1 would be perfect, because in Three Kingdoms, Zhou Yu was the genius military strategist who served under Zhou Yu, one of the three kings. Playtesting is super important because it helps you discover your blind spots. 

Sorry, Chen Gong

I made Zhou Yu a moustachioed guy

Recently I have been posting daily at my blog. I have been playing many new games on BoardGameArena.com, so there is a lot I can write about. All my posts are scheduled posts. Lately, at any time I probably have 6 to 10 posts in the queue to be published automatically. This post you are reading today was scheduled maybe a week ago. 

I write about every new game I play on BGA. Sometimes I play games I have played before. I don't write about those in detail, but I sometimes I share my new thoughts on them. 

My first play of Anachrony was with a physical copy. The mechas in the physical version are impressive. When playing on BGA, there is no more such visual impact. I did not find the game particularly interesting when I first played the physical copy. This second play hasn't changed my mind. I feel the game is complicated but I don't get much fun out of this complexity. I just find it tedious. Maybe this is a personal taste thing. 

Anachrony is worker placement game in which you collect resources and spend them to construct buildings and score points. This whole sentence sounds so generic and it can describe like half the heavy Eurogames we see nowadays. That basically sums up what I feel about the game. 

There is a more than 10 year gap since I last played Kingdom Builder. When the game was released, people paid attention because it was a design from Donald X Vaccarino, who designed Dominion, a genre-defining game. Kingdom Builder later won the 2012 Spiel des Jahres. I don't remember much about the game from when I played it many years ago. This probably means I didn't find it particularly interesting. However to my surprise I quite enjoyed my recent play. I had to relearn the game, exploring strategies, making mistakes and getting aha moments all over again. 

Every turn you must place 3 houses, but the terrain you can place on is determine by a card draw. There is randomness in this, and it seems you don't have much control. However you can actually put some thought into how you place your houses, so that no matter what terrain comes up next, you have something useful to do. So placing your houses actually takes some deep thought if you want to do well. This is certainly a much more strategic game than how simple a turn appears to be. 

Every game, out of the four scoring criteria, three are randomly drawn. Only castle scoring is fixed.

During the game, as you connect to towns, you gain special abilities that can be activated every turn. These can be very powerful. Some let you move houses (literally pick them up and put them somewhere else), some let you place extra houses. Now that I have played Kingdom Builder again, I find I really admire it. If you haven't tried this, find a chance to give it a go. 

When I first played 17: Diciassette I played it with two players, and I didn't think it works with two. Now I have played it with five, and it works much better. This should not have been a 2 to 5 player game. It should be 3 to 5. It is understandable that publishers want to put on the box as wide a player range as possible, the most common being 2 to 5. 

I first played Forest Shuffle online. Recently I played the physical version. Playing the physical version did not change my opinion. My opinion of the game started with being so-so. I saw it as just a lot of cards with different scoring conditions, and you are just trying to collect cards which combo well. Then as I played more, I warmed up a little to it because it has nice art, and set collection in itself is an enjoyable thing to do. And then as I played more, I reverted to my initial opinion. It's just lots of cards with different ways to score points. I understand why it is a successful product. I also understand why it's not my thing. Comparing the physical and digital versions, I prefer the digital version because the computer does the scoring for you. It is easy to see why others enjoy it. I witnessed myself first-time players clicking with it. They start deciding which animals and trees to collect, and then they start paying attention to what others are collecting so that they avoid giving away useful cards. They also quickly pick up the tactic of overflowing the board to discard cards which others want.