boardgaming on the iPad

I had almost forgotten about the various boardgame apps I had purchased on the iPad. Many were from a long time ago. I was bored one day and decided to pick up Le Havre again. Over the next several days I ended up revisiting several of these older games on the iPad. 

I have always liked Le Havre. The AI's on the iPad are not very strong and I tend to win most of the time. In the recent game I thought I did poorly. I was rusty and I saw the AI's constructing and buying buildings much more quickly than I could. Feeding time came frequently, usually after just two turns, and I felt under pressure to keep up with the food requirement. The AI's beat me to several buildings I liked. Thankfully in this game you can use other players' buildings. You just need to pay an entrance fee. When the game ended, I was a little surprised I managed to win, and by a comfortable margin. I guess the AI's only appeared smart because when they took their turns the animation was fast. 

I play Race for the Galaxy regularly and not only recently. Sometimes it is my bedtime game. I play a few games against AI's before sleeping. Even though I play with all three expansions of the first story arc, a game is still fast. I probably finish a game between 5 to 10 minutes. The iPad implementation is fantastic, and the AI's are good. Usability is amazing. 

It had been such a long time since I played Dominion, the pioneer of deckbuilding games. In the app the base game is free. You only need to pay if you want to buy the expansions. There are so many expansions now. I didn't do well against the AI's in Dominion. I was never good at it, and now I am rusty. 

I like how pretty the buildings are in Puerto Rico. The user interface is good in that you can see almost everything on one screen. However you need to open up a menu to see the building powers. 

I vaguely remember that the AI's are weak, but this time round I lost to them. I probably should pay a bit more attention to what they do and learn from how they play. I didn't do too bad. I was in second place. 

The last time I played San Juan I kept losing to the AI's. This time I did okay. I won some and lost some. They do put up a good challenge. 

It feels good to revisit some old titles. The sound effects, animation and user interface design of most of these apps feel dated, but the games are still decent. This was a nice stroll down memory lane. 

boardgaming in photos: online plays

I continue to play many boardgames online at BoardGameArena.com. In addition to my old friends Han and Allen, I am also playing with several other friends now. I'm playing with Jon and a few friends in his circle. I'm also playing with younger daughter Chen Rui. Chen Rui is studying overseas now, and we have a 7 hour time difference. Playing Innovation is a good way for father-daughter bonding. She video calls us regularly. Many years ago when I studied abroad, it was still the era of writing letters. I didn't even have email yet. No smart phone, and phone calls were expensive. 30 years later, communication technology has advanced so much. Now video calls are essentially free. 

I hadn't played Carnegie for a while and was rusty. I remember the game fondly. However this time I fumbled through the game. I should have read up the rulebook properly. This is a good game and I should have relearned it properly. 

I played Hanamikoji with Jon. What surprised me was our game ended after just one round. The stars really aligned for me. Hanamikoji is such a clever design. Minimalistic yet strategic. 

I have played the physical version of Imperial Settlers before. This time I was Japan and Han was Rome. He burnt many of my buildings, those flipped over at the top right corner. 

Han's Roman empire

This is one of the Japanese buildings, the daimyo's castle. It generates victory points (blue stars) every round. 

I have played a physical copy of New Frontiers too. This is the boardgame version of Race for the Galaxy. In this particular game I wanted to focus on novelty (blue) goods and on scoring victory point chips. 

At this point I had four worlds which could produce novelty goods. New Frontiers still doesn't work for me. It is not that it is a poor game. I absolutely adore Race for the Galaxy. I like Puerto Rico very much too. I just don't see the point in creating a fusion of these two games.  I don't feel that way about Roll for the Galaxy, because I find the dice mechanism different enough from Race for the Galaxy. One big difference between New Frontiers and Race for the Galaxy is that all developments are available for purchase right from the start. That allows you to plan much more precisely what to do with your space empire. This is like the buildings in Puerto Rico. It makes the game more strategic because you have more control. However I don't find it more fun, or important. I end up playing New Frontiers like I am playing Race for the Galaxy. Maybe that is my problem and not the game. I feel New Frontiers is a more tedious version of Race for the Galaxy. 

Han took the military path and eventually far outscored me, leaving me in the (space) dust. 

We did a 3-player game of Railways of the World - Han, Allen and I. We hadn't played this for some time. Allen made some mistakes in the early game, and got himself into a hole he never quite got out of. I (red) chose to operate in the northeast. The game board is huge, and I think too big for a 3-player game. We did not interfere much with one another. The northeast was good because cities were close to one another, so building tracks was cheaper. I was a little rusty too, and did not pay much attention to the special cards in the game. I should have utilised them better. 

Han was yellow and Allen blue. They both worked in the south. 

Han (yellow) eventually connected to a city I (red) connected to, but even then we didn't really interfere with each other. Later in the game I crossed the mountains to expand westwards, but I didn't go far. The game came with missions. I didn't pay much attention to them and never quite worked towards them. I guess I played this game like I was playing Age of Steam, its predecessor.  

One new appreciation I have now after playing Stupor Mundi more is that I need to get allies early. They score points every round, and this is an important source of points. 

The house I played this time (Di Romano) was new to me, and I found it interesting. I scored points for the progress of Frederick's Specialist. At this point of the game we were near game end. Our castles were almost completed. 

Frederick's castle was derelict by game end, and I realise this is absolutely normal. This aspect doesn't really jive with the theme. Frederick is supposed to be great and all. But the game is excellent, so this is forgivable. Frederick's castle is a tool for competition among the players. It is a battlefield. It is where players sabotage one another. 

I played two games of Zenith recently and greatly enjoyed them. In this particular game, we managed to get many cards in play. I have never had this many cards in play. Cards in play give you discounts the next time you play a card of the same colour. Many of my cards could be played for free. Zenith is a game I didn't expect to enjoy. I look at all the rules and don't find anything particularly interesting. This is just a tug of war on five different tracks. Yet when I sat down to play, it surprised me. There are some clever yet subtle aspects to the design. The ability to increase your hand size to 5 and to 6 doesn't seem like much, but since there are 5 colours in the game, this apparently slight advantage can actually be very helpful. Having cards of the right colour at the right time is crucial. Also with a bigger hand you are able to plan ahead better. It's great fun to be able to make good use of your cards and your techs. This game deserves more attention. 

Game showcase at Lolla Paluza cafe - 26 Oct 2025

I have been invited to showcase my games at Lolla Paluza Cafe in Taman Paramount, Petaling Jaya this coming Sunday. 

Path of Civilization

This is a civilisation themed game which uses an interesting card mechanism. Cards represent your technology and capability. You always have a hand of five cards, and every round you use four of them to make progress. Every round you will lose a card, and you have the opportunity to buy a new one, hopefully a better one. 

Game cards have two parts. They either generate resources (left) or science points (right). Every round you must arrange four of your cards on your player board so that two of them generate resources and the other two generate science. The card not used will be the one discarded forever. 

When you gain science, they come in five different types, and science is like a currency you can accumulate. Every round you spend science to buy a new card in one of the five tech types. Cards have different grades, with the higher grade cards costing more science. Your nation will get stronger and stronger as you acquire better and better cards. 

With the resources you gain, you can do all sorts of things. Each resource type is for one specific purpose, and it’s a matter of generating enough to do what you plan to do. There are specific resources for recruiting leaders, building wonders, developing military strength and advancing in philosophy. All of these give you benefits in different ways. 

The game is played over 10 rounds. From the third round onwards, events occur every round. You know what events they are, because they are set up and revealed at the start of the game. Some events give you benefits if you fulfil certain criteria. Many events are wars. When wars happen, you must have achieved a certain strength threshold, else you will be penalised. Your strength is also compared with others, and rewards are given based on ranking. You have an ongoing arms race. 

Wonders and leaders

What makes the game interesting for me is the core card mechanism. You must prioritise between resources and science you want to generate, and you are constantly thinking about which card you will abandon, and which card you will buy. This is a relentless march of time. The rest of the game is just okay for me. They are there to flesh out this central mechanism. They work, but they are nothing to write home about. Competition between players is indirect. You do compare military strength, and you compete for the same pool of leaders and wonders. However you are mostly managing your own nation. You don’t compete to buy cards. There are enough to go around. This is a decent package if you like civilisation themed games. 

Happy Deepavali

 

Happy Deepavali everyone! Although this is an Indian festival, it is celebrated by Malaysian of all races and religions. That's Malaysia!

This is art from my upcoming game Malaysian Holidays, by Lim Chi Qing of Sunny Day. The game will be published by Specky Studio before the end of 2025. Watch out for updates here! 

Botanicus

In Botanicus you are gardeners growing flowers in your own gardens. You have your own player board and you do your best to create the most beautiful garden. 

This is the player board. You have a gardener pawn which moves about the garden. You can only plant flowers or water them at the four plots next to the gardener, so expect the gardener will need to move about a lot. Every movement costs $1, and money is tight in this game. On the right side of every row there are two missions. If you have the specific combination of flower types in that row, you fulfil the mission and score points. Flowers can be divided into four stages. Yellow is seedling, and as the flower grows, it progresses to pink, green and eventually blue. When you get to plant a new flower, it is usually a seedling (yellow). Sometimes you get to plant pink or green. When you water a flower, it grows to the next stage. 

This is the main board. Every player has a flower shaped token. The bottom half of the board consists of worker placement spots. You place your token here to perform actions. In the first round, you place your token in the first column, and thereafter for each subsequent round you always move to the next column. If a spot has been claimed by another player you can still put your token on top of theirs and perform the same action. However, this costs you $3 per token you top. This is an expensive thing to do. How you place your token in the current column determines the turn order for the next round. Generally the lower spots are stronger than the higher ones, but if you take the stronger spots, next round you go later in turn order. 

In the top half of the main board there are three tracks. Everyone has a progress marker at each track. One track is mainly for making money, another is for watering flowers, and the last is for planting flowers. When you choose a worker placement spot, you often get to advance your progress marker on one of these tracks. You perform the actions specified at the place you stop. You can choose to advance a shorter distance than allowed. By doing this you earn some money. You can also choose to advance further than permitted. To do this you must pay extra. For all three tracks when your marker reaches the end, you score a bonus before resetting your marker. The earlier you reach the end, the bigger the bonus. The bonus devalues as more and more people reach the end. 

Money bag, wheelbarrow and shovel are the icons for the three tracks. 

Another thing you can do is to collect animals. I played the basic game, and when you collect animals, you just score points. In the advanced game, animals have various functions and help you in different ways. On the player board, the rows are for completing missions. The columns matter as well. Every completed column will score points based on the most valuable flower in the column. 

This is a pleasant game to play. Every turn you do one small thing, but step by step you are making progress on several projects. It is generally a peaceful game. You don't mess with others' gardens. At most you can scoff, but please don't do that. That's not nice. There is some competition on the main board. You somewhat race on the three tracks, because whoever gets to the end earlier does receive a bigger bonus. You compete for the worker placement spots. Technically you can use the same spot taken by someone else, but the $3 payment is steep. Also at some spots there is a benefit available only to the first player to place a token. Botanicus is a soothing family strategy game. 

Leaping Lions

Leaping Lions was the winner of the 2023 Button Shy Games game design competition, designed by Darryl Tan, a fellow Malaysian. It is encouraging to see my fellow countryman attain such achievements on the international stage. Leaping Lions, like most games from Button Shy, is an 18-card microgame. It uses their standard packaging too. It is a wallet game (photo above). This is a game about the traditional Chinese lion dance. So the packaging is red with golden lettering, just like the angpows (red packets) given out during Chinese New Year. 

Rulebook cover

This is what it looks like when you open the wallet

Leaping Lions is a 2-player game. You set up a high pole lion dance performance. Whoever can set up and execute the most impressive performance wins. 

Each player gets one lion

This is how the game is set up - three columns of cards and the draw deck on the right. The cards in the game are double sided, with a basic side and an upgraded side. These above are all on the basic side. Some card powers let you upgrade your cards to the other side. You take turns claiming cards from the centre of the table until all cards are taken. When a card is taken, other cards in the row are shifted left as necessary, and the space on the right is filled with the top card from the deck. 

Using the cards you claim, you form a row of cards before you. A new card is always added to the right of existing cards. You can choose to discard a card instead of adding it to your row. When you do this, you can upgrade a card or advance your lion. Your lion starts on the ground to the left of your row. When it starts advancing, it first jumps onto the first card. After that it advances towards the right. By game end, the further your lion manages to move, the more points you will score. 

Some cards have special powers. Some of these are activated when you play the card. Some can be activated every turn. There are four ways you score points. I've just talked about the lion advancement. The second way is cards in sequence. Every card is numbered, and you want your cards to be in ascending order as much as possible. Every stretch of ascending numbers with at least three poles will score points. The more poles you have in the stretch, the more points you will score. 

There are five different icons on the cards. Three of them are musical instruments - drums, gongs and cymbals. The other two are fire crackers and fans. Every completed set of musical instruments scores points. At game end, you also multiply your number of fire crackers and fans to score points. When you choose a card and decide whether to upgrade a card, you must consider all these scoring opportunities. You also need to consider the special powers offered by the cards. 

The first row shows the basic side, and the second the upgraded side. When you upgrade a card, you may get additional icons and sometimes an extra pole. 

The stars in the top right corner are used in two ways. At the end of the game, you score all the stars below and to the left of your lion. This is how the lion advancement works. Stars on your rightmost card also limit your options when you claim a card from the centre of the table. If your rightmost card has only one star, you may only pick from the first column. If it has two cards, you may pick from the first two columns, and so on. You need to consider your flexibility for your next turn when you claim a card. 

This is a game with a very simple procedure. You are just taking turns claiming cards until they run out. Yet, behind such a simple action, there is much you must consider. You must consider all four scoring opportunities. You must consider your flexibility for the next turn. You also consider what your opponent might want. The card powers must be considered too. 

I played Leaping Lions well before it was released, so I am pretty excited now to have the final product in my hand. Darryl certainly made Malaysia proud, as this is an excellent game. He continues to be active in submitting games, and there are other international publishers who are looking into his designs. This is wonderful news. As more and more Malaysian designs get released internationally, this will encourage other local creators, and this will help grow the industry in Malaysia. I am very much looking forward to that. 

Leaping Lions comes with two expansions. The first one adds scrolls, which is a new way of scoring points. Some of the new cards can only be upgraded when you fulfil certain conditions. 

The second expansion is a solo game. You play against a bot, and there are five bots to choose from. Each bot has an advanced version, so in a way you have 10 different opponents to pick from. 

Ahoy

The moment I started playing Ahoy, my first thought was this was Root at sea! However Ahoy is by a different designer. It is from the same publisher Leder Games though, and development was done by the same team which developed Root. What these two games have in common is how different the factions are. However the gameplay is very different. Ahoy is for 2 to 4 players. 

The play area is formed using square tiles, each having four spaces. The play area starts with just two tiles, but you can explore off the edges and expand the map. Every tile has a blue die, which shows its point value. This is how the Bluefin Squadron and the Mollusk Union score points. They compete for dominance at every tile and whoever is stronger scores points at the end of the round. The game is played until someone reaches 30 points. You compare points to see who wins. Tiles start with a point value of 1, but this point value can increase during the game, making some tiles more valuable than others. 

Every tile has exactly one island. Islands are where you get to recruit crew. They are also where Smugglers, the other faction type, pick up and deliver goods. With 2 players, you only play the Bluefin Squadron and the Mollusk Union. With more players the 3rd and 4th players will be independent Smugglers. In addition to scoring points for completed smuggling tasks, Smugglers also secretly bid on which of the two major powers will eventually control each island type. The Smugglers will score points for correct predictions. 

Every player has his own flagship. Your player board represents your flagship. The Bluefin Squadron  is blue, and the Mollusk Union yellow. Every round you roll four dice, and on your turn you place two dice on spaces on your player board to execute actions. The type and number of actions are limited by the spaces available on your player board. Some of the spaces only allow dice of specific values, some have no such restriction. During battle you may take damage, and it comes in the form of some of these spaces being temporarily disabled. You need to do repairs to reinstate them. It is possible to modify your die rolls, but you'll need to pay, and money is not easy to come by. 

These are crew members you can recruit. You need to be at islands with the corresponding icons to recruit them. Usually you need to pay an onboarding bonus (money). Sometimes you pay by using up one die. Crew members give you all sorts of powers. Some help you fight more effectively, some help you sail better, some help you make money. These crew cards can be treated as goods by the Smugglers. The cards specify where they can be picked up (top) and where they need to be delivered (bottom). 

One advantage the Bluefin Squadron has over others is they have 5 dice instead of 4. That means they get to perform one more action every round. Every time they sail, they may deploy a patrol (those dorsal fins in the screenshot above). Patrols have a strength of 1 which contribute to controlling a tile. They can be used to explore new tiles and immediately take control of these new tiles because they are the only units there. The Mollusk Union doesn't have patrols, but they can deploy comrades on islands. Comrades cannot fight or move, but they help to control tiles. Unlike the Bluefin Squadron, the Mollusk Union has cards. This means they always have something up their sleeve which the Squadron doesn't know. 

There are many different features on the tiles. Currents force ships to move an extra step. Fogs prevent battle. Wrecks cause damage, but you can usually get money from them. Ports offer free repairs. Some spaces show a die with a specific value. One action type is to sail by tailwind. If you use a die for this, you get to sail (well, teleport) directly to a space with that specific die value. 

The Smuggler's player board is different from the others, and they have a second, smaller player board. Whenever they make a delivery, they move the white cube to an adjacent space and claim the benefit on that space. The Smuggler has one unique action - Full Sail. When placing a die on the Full Sail space, they can move as many steps as the pips on the die. This can be very powerful. The normal Sail action only allows moving up to two steps. 

I have done both a two-player game and a three-player game. The two-player game is pretty good, because there are already significant differences between the Bluefin Squadron and the Mollusk Union. The game shines when you have at least a third player, because this is when even more layers come into play. With three players, tiles which receive deliveries from the Smuggler increase in value. While the two major powers clash, they must pay attention to what the Smuggler is doing. The Smuggler doesn't compete for dominance, but I think both the major powers sometimes need to make life harder for the Smuggler, even though they don't appear threatening. In the three-player game I played, I was the Bluefin Squadron, Han the Mollusk Union and Jon the Smuggler. Jon's points lagged behind Han and I, so I didn't pay him much attention and focused on fighting Han. I didn't do well and lost many battles. I didn't have money to recruit crew. What I had underestimated was the points Jon would get by predicting eventual island control correctly. When we did final scoring, he overtook both of us and won. Lesson learnt - never underestimate the underdog! Or I should say he wasn't the underdog and I never realised so. 

There is some luck in the battles. The basic mechanism is both parties rolling one die each to compare strength. To improve your odds, you can load cannons. This needs to be done before you engage in battle. It does cost you one action to load cannons, so it can be tough decision if you don't intend to attack but you are just worried whether others will attack you. If you have a loaded cannon, when battle is joined you can spend some of your cannonballs to increase your strength. It just may turn the battle in your favour. In case of ties in battle, the attacker wins. Aggression is rewarded. 

The fun in Ahoy is how different the factions are. You must know your own strengths and utilise them well. You must also understand your opponents' abilities and how to counter them. So far I have only played the Bluefin Squadron. I really enjoy spamming the seas with my patrols, sending them out to explore new tiles and then score points with them. Due to the uniqueness of the factions, learning the game does take a bit more effort, but it is very much worth it. I consider this a heavy game. It is not as heavy as Root, and the various mechanisms when considered separately are quite simple. When put together they make a complex and interesting game. 

The Mollusk Union has cards which allow them to deploy two smaller ships.