Diamonds

Diamonds is a trick-taking game for 2 to 6 players. The basic rules are the same as standard trick-taking games. You must follow suit if you can, and the highest card in the lead suit wins the trick. There is no trump suit. What's special about this game is the suit powers. There are four suits in the game, and the cards are numbered 1 to 15. 

The theme is jewellers. Each player has his own jewellery shop and vault, and you can place diamonds at both places. The difference between putting diamonds at your shop or your vault is diamonds at your shop might get stolen by your opponents. When the game ends, diamonds in your shop are worth 1pt each, and those in your vault are 2pts each. Everyone can see how many diamonds are at your shop, but the amount in your vault is secret. 

The winner of a trick gets to perform the action associated with the lead suit. It the suit is diamond, you earn a diamond and put it directly in your vault. If it is heart, you earn a diamond at your shop. If spade, you move a diamond from shop to vault. If club, you steal a diamond from the shop of a specific player. One interesting rule is if you are unable to follow suit and must play a card off suit, you get to perform the action associated with the card you play. So not being able to follow suit is a good thing. You won't win the trick, but you get to do something. At the end of a round, you compare your cards won and see who has the most cards in each suit. The winners get to perform an action associated with the suit. So you do want to win tricks. 

There is a victim marker which gets passed around. Whenever anyone steals, they steal from the player holding the marker, and then the marker is passed left. If you steal when the marker is with you, you lose nothing. You just pass the marker to the next person. 

Diamonds is a pretty conventional trick-taking game, so it will be easy to teach non-gamers. The tactics are similar to traditional trick-taking games, and they will be able to play competently quickly. Mike Fitzgerald is the designer of the Mystery Rummy series which I greatly enjoy. Diamonds is built on top of a traditional game, but it adds some fun ideas, turning a traditional game into something new. It is a game that can be played in a light-hearted manner, but it does offer some strategic depth. 

Burst

Burst is a light card game that can be described as group Black Jack. That’s just like my game Pinocchio, but in Pinocchio the cards are hidden. In Burst you can see all the cards played. 

On your turn you either draw a card or play a card to the centre of the table. You have a hand size of three, so if you have three cards, you must play one. Cards in hand are your points. They are scored only at the end of the round, and you score points only if you do not go bust. Going bust means playing a card that makes the total on the table go beyond 21. This only happens when you have three cards and you are forced to play a card. Having three high cards in hand is good, but only if you don’t go bust. 

The card distribution is wide. There are many 1’s and 0’s. There are some cards from 2 to 10. The big cards go up to 15, but there are few of them.  There are some negative numbers. 

Some cards have special powers, for example allowing you to remove another card from the pool, to take a card into your hand, or to reverse the order of play. 

When anyone goes bust, the round ends and they score nothing. Everyone else scores according to their cards in hand. People will tend to be greedy and want to keep the high cards. However taking a third card always comes with risk. When you have two high cards, it is hard to resist drawing your third card because you cannot bear to part with a high card. Yet if you go bust all is for naught. 

In this game you have plenty of opportunities to hurt your opponents. The card distribution and card powers help players push the total to 21 or near 21. If the next player has three cards and doesn’t have a small enough card to play, he is doomed. There will be unexpected twists of fate. An untimely reverse can kill some players. Sometimes several players with three cards can survive a high total because they have 0’s, negative cards, or cards with powers. 

In the first game I played, the game felt draggy because we scored low every round. I felt the winning score should be 50 and not 100. Only in my second game I realised it was possible to score quite high. So 100 feels right. You can always choose a lower target if you want to make the game shorter. I think this is a wonderful game. Simple, exciting, and full of surprises. 

Pick the next Cili Padi title

I would like to hear your opinion.

Since 2022, Cili Padi Games has been publishing one game per year. My idea is to do this once a year to gradually build up my product line and my brand. However I also remind myself that my goal is to focus on being a designer, not a publisher. If I am able to pitch a to a publisher successfully, I would happily play the role of designer only. So far I have published Dancing Queen, Snow White and the Eleven Dwarfs, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and Pinocchio. I am partnering with Specky Studio (with them being the publisher) to release Malaysian Holidays and Rebels of the Three Kingdoms. Malaysian Holidays will be out early 2026, in conjunction with Visit Malaysia Year. Most of the work is done now. Publishing work has not started for Rebels, but we are hoping to release it in 2026 too. What I am working on now is what to release under my own Cili Padi Games in 2026. 

Art from Malaysian Holidays

At the moment I have three candidates: Math Dice, Apa You Cakap and Bet West. I'll briefly explain each of them and my considerations, but before I do that I want to talk about Rebels. This is because it is representative of the style of Cili Padi titles. Since I am trying to build a brand, I should have a consistent style. At least that's what I think now. The Cili Padi style is small box card games. My games feature important hidden information, double guessing among players, and players trying to mislead others or outright lying to them. I think my 2026 game should be something like this too. I'm not 100% sure this is the best strategy or a necessary one. For now this seems to be the sensible thing to do. 

In Rebels of the Three Kingdoms your character powers are secret, and without knowing for sure who has what power, you have to decide who to form a team with. The reason I came up with this design is I wanted to turn typical social deduction games upside down. In games like Werewolf and Secret Hitler, you don't know who is on which team and you spend much effort figuring that out. In Rebels, you openly decide whose team you want to be on. 

This is not a team game though. This is still very much every person for himself. New teams are formed every round. Your friend today might be your enemy tomorrow. Your team is but a tool for achieving your personal goal. I know this sounds rather negative, but hey this is just a game. Please don't be like this in real life. 

The gameplay of Rebels is very much in the vein of other Cili Padi games. Three Kingdoms is not a fairly tale, but it is a historical story, so that's close enough. Specky Studio specialises in educational games. Rebels is a good fit for their product line because Three Kingdoms is history, and literature too. The game mechanism reflects that era of every lord for himself and shifting alliances. 

Let's talk about Math Dice. I started designing this with the intention to pitch to corporates which might want to have a boardgame as merchandise or as a premium gift. This is an educational game and a mass market game. Something parents would want to buy for their children, and schools would want to use as a learning tool. 

There are three types of dice. The blue and yellow have numbers while the white has operators. What you need to do in the game is to use dice to make valid equations. There are some rules for the die faces. The 6 and 9 are interchangeable. So are the 1 and the minus sign. Multiplication and addition signs are not interchangeable. Multiplication is red and addition is black. Using this photo above, what are the equations you can think of? The more dice you want to include in an equation the harder it will be. Let's look at some example solutions.

5 x 6 = 30

16 x 5 = 80

18 x 5 = 90

(36 x 5) / 1 = 180

In the first version of Math Dice, after the dice are rolled, players study the dice together and race to pick up cards. If you find a way to create an equation using six dice, you pick up the card showing 6 dice. Later on you will need to prove it by arranging the dice. In case you can't do it or you have forgotten how to do it, you will be penalised. You take the NO card if you think it is impossible to make any equation with the dice rolled. If no one is able to make any equation, this will be the only card which scores. If you are able to make an equation with all the dice rolled, you take the SUPER card. This is the highest scoring card. That card showing three 9's is just a reminder that whenever you manage an equation with a three digit number, you score 2 points. 

I am going to change how this game works. During playtesting, I found that players often had difficulty remembering their equations. So they needed pen and paper to write them down. Now I want to make pen and paper part of the game. You need to write down as many equations as you can within a time limit. Every correct equation gives you 1 point. For a specific number of dice, if you are the only person who manages an equation, you will score bonus points.

Of my three candidates, I think this one has the lowest chance of being selected to be my next game. It is very different from the Cili Padi style. It has the educational game vibes, which I worry is rather out of place compared to the rest of my product line. I don't know the educational games market well, and I don't feel confident about marketing an educational game. On the other hand, doing something different might present new opportunities. This game might create inroads to new markets. This is not the kind of game that old gamers play, and because of that I have difficulty convincing myself to release it under Cili Padi Games. It's my instinct and I know it's wrong. Publishing games is not about making games you like, it is about making games your target audience wants. 

The second candidate is Apa You Cakap, which is a phrase mixing Malay and English. It means "What are you saying?" This was inspired by multilingual Malaysia. The first language you speak with a friend will often become the default language you speak, even if you later find out that you both know another language and you are both more fluent in that. When I went to Penang for the Asian Board Games Festival, Jon, Jia Xian and I were in the same car, and while Jia Xian and I spoke Mandarin, and Jia Xian and Jon spoke Mandarin too, when Jon and I spoke to each other, we used English. All three of us spoke Mandarin, but since English was the first language Jon and I conversed in, it became our default. Imagine this three way conversation with a mix of Mandarin of English, and none of us finding it unusual or unnatural. That's Malaysia. 

There are six Malaysian languages in the game. To win the game you need to be able to chat with everyone using their preferred language, all within the same turn. Let's translating that to game mechanism - your conversation partner shows a language card, and you must be able to show that same language from your hand too. During the game there are ways to find out what languages the other players speak. This game requires some memorisation. 

In the game you have a secret crush. If he or she wins, you win too. This creates some collaboration among the players, but this isn't a cooperative game nor is it a team game. If you happen to be the secret crush of your secret crush then yes, as luck would have it, you are effectively a two-person team. 

I started working on this game because I wanted to create something which showcases an aspect of being Malaysian. I wanted a game which Malaysians can relate to, and at the same time if marketed overseas, a unique aspect about Malaysia can become the hook. I have never published a Malaysian themed game before. This is something outside of my comfort zone. Perhaps it also means this is a new opportunity.

Apa You Cakap still needs many rounds of playtesting. The core loop isn't settled yet and I am still experimenting. Initially I was a little doubtful about this design. The premise is interesting, but I was worried I couldn't come up with an interesting mechanism. Now that I have tested this several times, I am starting to see the fun elements surfacing. I am still making big changes. I am hopeful this can be developed into a game worth publishing, whether under Cili Padi Games or under other labels. 

When I make game prototypes I now use cards from the One Piece card game. Younger daughter Chen Rui bought a ton of cards cheap. She doesn't actually play the game but she is a fan of One Piece. She collects the cards because of that. There are many cards she didn't want, so I asked her to give them to me. I can save some money buying poker cards.

The third game I am considering is Bet West. This is the revitalised Saikoyu. It is a gambling game with a Journey of the West theme pasted on. I submitted Saikoyu to a game design competition some time ago, and it didn't even make it past the first round. The feedback I received was that there was too little basis for players to make meaningful decisions. The judges suggested I take a look at Coyote. I do think players don't have enough control, which translates to a poor experience. 

Bet West uses the same concept as Hanabi. You can see everyone's cards but not your own. You have only one card. Every round the player with the highest card wins. The largest number is 13, and the smallest is 1. Cards numbered 4, 8, and 10 trigger special conditions when in play. For example when 4 is in play, the smallest card wins instead. If 8 is in play, all odd numbers become zero. With these quirks thrown in, it is not easy to guess your odds of winning.

In Saikoyu, everyone proposes a bet amount, and the bet used for the round will be the second highest amount. The basis for guessing your own number is how other players propose their bet amounts. What they propose is a reflection of what they see. You can use that to guess your own number. However players generally still feel they have too little control. So I have now made some changes. 

I now make the game a bit more like poker. You will have to pay an ante every round, but you will not be forced to lose a huge sum when multiple other players want to go big. You can Fold and just lose the small ante. I have added a Raise mechanism. You can Raise to try to bluff, and to see your opponents' reactions. Whether they Call or Fold gives you clues as to what your card might be. I've added a Side Bet mechanism. This is also a way to get hints about what your card is. When you propose a Side Bet against another player, you state the bet amount. If the other player accepts, this Side Bet will only be resolved at the end of the round. However if they decline, they must pay you half the bet amount immediately. So you see this can be a way for you to bluff too. 

The Guanyin card (Goddess of Mercy) is a powerful and disruptive one. It allows you to discard you card and draw a new one. Obviously this can completely turn things upside down. There is only one such card in the game. 

The theme is completely pasted on. In fact I feel a little guilty pasting this story related to Buddhism onto a gambling game. I do think using themes already familiar to people is useful. It is something that attracts people and gives people a sense of familiarity. It creates a better play experience. Now that I think about it, maybe the 8 should not be Tang Sanzang (Tripitaka) and should be Zhu Bajie (Pigsy) instead. After all the 8 (Ba) is literally in his name. 

The style of Bet West is consistent with Cili Padi Games. There is critical information which is hidden, and there are ways you can try to figure it out. There is double guessing among players, and opportunities to bluff and lie. 

Which do you think should be the next Cili Padi Games title? Math Dice, Apa You Cakap, or Bet West? Please comment below and share your reasoning. 

Super Fantasy Brawl

Super Fantasy Brawl is a 2-player game in which you control a team of three fighters and you go head to head against the opponent team in a grand arena decorated with three statues.  You don’t fight to the death. Instead you race to score points. Fighters don’t die. They respawn at the deployment zone. You score points by knocking out enemy fighters and by completing challenges, which are mostly related to controlling specific areas in the arena. Challenges can only be claimed at the start of your turn. You must not only capture the required positions, you must also hold on to them till your next turn. 

Every fighter you add to your team comes with a set of cards. These cards form your deck. Every turn you draw five cards, and you have one each of red, blue and yellow mana to spend to activate cards. Unused cards are discarded and you will draw five new cards. Each card belongs to a specific fighter and can only be used for them. Fighters can move, melee attack, range attack, pull or push other fighters, heal, and so on. If your cards don’t suit you, you can spend mana on basic actions, for example moving two steps. 

Whenever attacked, you have the option to respond. You can spend mana and cards which are meant for your next turn. However this also means you will do less when your turn comes. 

Challenges operate like a sushi belt. They march across a display, moving one step per round. When they first appear they cannot be claimed. Then their value will go from 1 point to 2 points, and eventually back to 1 point again before they disappear because they are not claimed. You have to choose which challenges to attempt, and ideally you time your moves so that you score 2 points instead of 1. 

The fighters have different personalities and strengths. There is no restriction to how you build your team. Teams are drafted at the start of the game. There are plenty of combinations you can play with. 

I played this on BoardGameArena.com. The physical game has pretty miniatures and looks much better than the digital implementation. I’m not really a tactical battle game guy, so I didn’t find the game interesting. This is a game about knowing your fighters well and making the best out of what you draw. Fighters can complement and support one another, fully utilising their unique abilities. 

Photo from boardgamegeek.com

Flatiron

The Flatiron building is a famous landmark in New York, well-known for its triangular shape. When I first saw the name, I thought it was rather weird because I thought it was pronounced as "fla-tee-ron". Only after I saw the Chinese name I realised this name was "flat" and "iron" combined. I feel dumb now. This is a 2-player game about constructing the Flatiron building. You are builders working on this skyscraper. When the project is completed, you compare points to see who wins. 

Game setup

There are four main streets surrounding the construction site. A stack of cards is set up at each street. The game uses a worker placement mechanism. These four streets and the city council are the five spots you can place your worker. Each player has only one worker. On your turn you must move him to a new spot to perform an action. 

This is your player board. It is divided into four columns. These four columns correspond to the four streets. When you visit a street, you can buy the top card there, or you can execute the actions on your player board matching that street. When you buy cards, you can tuck them below or above your player board, depending on whether you want to use the top half or bottom half of the card. This augments the actions available at your player board. Every column can have at most 3 cards added. You can't remove cards, so you have to think carefully when you add cards. When you execute actions at a particular column on your player board, you always go from top to bottom. The dark coloured cards are not action cards. They are scoring cards which will only be evaluated at the end of the game. 

Those coloured circles on your player board are your storage for the four types of pillars. Each storage space can store just one pillar in one specific colour. You need pillars for constructing the building. At each level of the building you'll need to build three pillars of different colours before you can build the next floor.

Actions you can perform in the game include buying pillars, selling pillars, building pillars, building floors, making money, and exchanging pillars. The player boards for the two players are different. The pillar costs and action positions differ.

Every floor has a unique rule. This rule takes effect when the floor is the topmost visible floor. In the photo above, the floor-specific rule is whoever visits the red street (5th Avenue) earns $1. There are three positions on a floor for building pillars. Some of them give specific rewards. The act of building pillars gives you points. The more expensive that pillar is, the more points you'll score. 

The player workers block each other. You often want to deliberately deny your opponent if you see there is something he wants to get or do. 

This is the scoring board. Whenever the leading player reaches a multiple of 10, he collects two newspapers from the paper boy (the white pawn), and the paper boy jumps to the next multiple of 10. Newspapers are single-use special powers. The leading player keeps one and gives the other to the trailing player.

Some cards that you buy affect your reputation. At the end of the game, your reputation is evaluated independently for each of the four columns at your player board. You get a bonus if the column sum is positive, or a penalty if it is negative. This is another consideration when you purchase cards. Yet another consideration is that you can only have one dark card per column.

This is a very Euro strategy game. You must plan to upgrade your player board because this makes your actions more powerful. You will be able to do more within a single turn. This is the interesting part of the game. You can augment your abilities differently from game to game. You try to build effective combos. And all this is happening at the same time as you are trying to construct the Flatiron building as efficiently as possible. This is a two player game that does not feel like a two player game. I wonder whether it was originally designed as a multiplayer game, but during development they found that it worked mostly as a two player game, and then decided to make it so. 

I played with Jetta at Board Game Station, which is in Fo Tan, Hong Kong.

Moonshine

Moonshine is a game about running a speakeasy in the prohibition era. You roll dice to generate resources. You have some casual customers who can help you generate resources or roll more dice. You will spend resources to recruit your casual customers to become loyal customers. Some of these give permanent benefits. Some give points. When you reach 12 points, the game ends and you win. 

Your speakeasy card is your player board. It offers some abilities, but you need to commit  moon tokens to enable these abilities. Casual customers have such abilities too. Moon tokens are an important resource to manage. You have to decide how to use them. Abilities on cards can be in the form of producing a specific resource, allowing you an extra dice, giving rerolls, or giving more slots for casual customers. In the top right corner of a casual customer you can see the cost to recruit them to become a loyal customer. This cost includes moon tokens. This is often a tricky decision. When you need to pay moon tokens, it means you are removing them from some card abilities which you are currently using. You need to decide which one(s) to sacrifice.  

In your play area, the speakeasy card is on the left, and to the right you have the casual customers. Loyal customers you recruit are tucked under your speakeasy, showing the point values and any abilities. 

There is a little engine building in this game. You want to improve your ability to generate more resources and recruit more customers. One thing I learned the hard way was you have to be deliberate in which customers to recruit. You shouldn’t just recruit anyone you can afford when you can afford them. Recruiting costs valuable moon tokens. In the early game you probably want to recruit customers who give you useful powers. You want to build your engine. In the late game you’d be pushing for points. Some customers create synergies, for example scoring points based on customer type. These combos are good. You need to recruit purposefully. 

I feel this is a race game. You are racing towards 12 points. You don’t interfere with one another much. This is a peaceful light strategy game. You need to plan wisely. I did not find it captivating. It works and offers meaning decisions, just that it wasn’t very memorable to me. 

BGC retreat 2025 - three days of play, eat, sleep

12 - 14 December 2025 was the BGC boardgame retreat organised by Jeff and Wai Yan of boardgamecafe.net. This is already their 13th year doing this. Although I have known Jeff and Wai Yan for many years, this was the first time I participated in their annual retreat. I did participate in a mini retreat some years ago, but this was not the main annual event. So I consider myself a newbie. 

The venue was Klana Beach Resort in Teluk Kemang, near Port Dickson. It's about 1.5 hours drive from KL. I carpooled with Xiu Yi, who has been to the retreat before. 

We played basically 9am - 11pm Friday and Saturday, and 9am - 6pm Sunday. We did break for lunch and dinner, and we did get some sleep, but this really was nothing else but boardgames for three whole days. I am a little surprised I didn't get sick of it and I didn't feel tired. Three days just passed too quickly. Time flies when you are having fun. The format of the event was mostly free-and-easy. There was a spreadsheet set up so that people could schedule specific games to be played and invite others to join. This was mainly for the longer and more complex games, sometimes looking for a specific player count. We were not 100% strict about following the schedule. We did sometimes change or cancel plans. However having such a schedule did help with coordination. I managed to play all four of the older and slightly longer games I brought. 

Wine Cellar is a beautiful game. This was the first game I played at the retreat with those who arrived a little early. We were all waiting for the official announcement of the start of event, and being gamers, of course we would pull out a short game.

These were some of the games I brought. The four medium-to-long games which I scheduled were Tribune, Beowulf: The Legend, The Great Zimbabwe and Taj Mahal. I brought 19 different games (not counting my prototypes), and managed to play 10 of them. 

I brought five games still under development for playtesting. I managed to get three of them playtested, and I received good feedback from the players. I also gained several insights from observing the games being played. Dith, being the gamer, immediately understood the intricacies of Rebels of the Three Kingdoms. It's always a joy to see the light bulb turn on. Xiu Yi said Bet West (Journey to the West themed gambling game) will be great for Chinese New Year season. I still need to adjust the action mechanism. In this version I tested, a player may either claim an action card to perform the corresponding action, or they may increase the bet amount. I think I should streamline this by making increasing the bet one of the action cards too. This limits the number of times the bet can be increased. 

I saw several problems with Apa You Cakap (a game about multilingual Malaysia). Han suggested I should let players start with three cards instead of one, since most people tend to just draw cards in the first two rounds. I think he's right. In this game everyone has a secret goal. If the person or persons specified by your secret goal card wins, you also win. One problem I see is people don't share this information much. There are few mechanisms which expose this information. I need to find a way to make such information known, because this information affects the interactions among players. Generally I need players to be able to gain more information more quickly. The pace feels a little slow now. One element I plan to bring in is the secret crush. During the ideation stage I toyed with the idea of everyone having a secret crush. If your crush wins, you win too. This idea did not get into the first version, but now I plan to add it in, and remove the current secret goals. 

Naturally I brought all four games I have published under Cili Padi Games, two copies each. 

This was our game library. Probably 80% brought by Jeff. The attendees did bring games they wanted to play. Usually longer games or complex games which are hard to arrange the time and people to play. 

I hear that every year there will be at least one game from the 18XX series played, usually after dinner. 

So it is not hearsay!

This is the observatory building as seen from my hotel room. 

Our hall was large and spacious. It was in the observatory building and not the main resort building. We really should have played Galileo Galilei. 

Panda Panda is a fun little filler. G is the rarest card, only one copy in the whole deck. It's a gold foil card too. 

Han is one of my oldest gaming buddies. We have been gaming for more than 20 years. We took this photo to show to Allen. The three of us used to play together regularly, and we were even called the Midah group, because Allen lives in Taman Midah. Unfortunately Allen couldn't join the retreat because he already had something planned for the weekend. I decided to join quite late. I hadn't originally planned to, but Han said he was going, and since I did not have work or other activities that weekend, I decided to go. Thankfully there were still available slots.

For many years the retreat was conducted in a tournament format. Now it is much more free-and-easy. However there is still a mini competition. We had a 3-round competition, each using a different short game. It started with 4 groups of 4 players each. Every round half were eliminated, so for the finals there were four players. Trio was the first round game. 

I have played Trio before. It is simple and a little quirky. There is a fair bit of luck and also a memory element. A lot of fun and it works for non gamers. 

Trio is design from Japan

Cat and the Tower is another Japanese design. I did not play this though. It is certainly an eye-catching game, so I took several photos. 

I wonder whether it's like Jenga. I did not hear people scream or see the tower collapse though. 

Carefully...

Cat meeples!

I saw Forbidden Jungle being played but I did not play. I would have been interested to see how it worked compared to others in the Forbidden series. 

Forbidden Jungle

Saw but did not play.

Covenant

I was hoping to get a 19 player game of Snow White and the Eleven Dwarfs. That is the max player count now, with the 2nd edition of the game, instead of 18. There is a new character - the Huntsman. We did not manage 19, but we did have 14. That was enough to have a game which included several variant modules - Prince Charming, Evil Queen and Huntsman. 

I was dwarf #7. With the Evil Queen in play, everyone took notes very carefully, because there could be a liar. We also needed to remember the sequence of who looked at whose card, because whenever any dwarf looked at the Queen's card, they would convert to become evil, and they could be lying. That meant they could be honest up to a certain point, and then start lying. At one point, I had a suspicion that Jeff might be the Queen, because there was a third person Jia Yaik wanting to look at his card. This seemed a waste of resources. We said to Jia Yaik that he shouldn't be looking at Jeff's card, and he should look at Han's. No one had seen Han's card yet. Han had looked at and found the Huntsman. So Han hadn't been able to give clues about what his own card was. When Jia Yaik insisted on looking at Jeff's card, I wondered whether he was a dwarf who wanted to turn evil, because he felt the chances of winning were better on the Queen's team. 

Piecing together the information we had was challenging. We had to start asking more detailed questions. We were careful and mostly gave clues in the form of the difference between two numbers, without revealing who had the bigger number. Gradually we realised we had to ask about which number was bigger. It would give more information to Snow White, but we needed that information ourselves too. 

As I worked out my deductions, I suddenly realised I knew who had all the numbers except for 1 and 10. As a dwarf I knew number 1 was in the hand of one of the players. That meant the missing number  at the centre of the table was 10. I hurriedly declared that I wanted to guess, and I got it right! The dwarfs won! 

What was funny was after the game, I realised two of my deductions were wrong. Xiang Yang whom I thought was 11 was actually the Queen. And Sam whom I thought was the 4 was actually the 1. Gosh... I was just lucky that 10 turned out to be the correct number. I could have caused my team to lose and the Queen to win. Xiang Yang, being the Queen, lied. When he saw that Sam had a 1, he said their sum was 15. That was impossible. The numbers only went up to 11. I thought at that point Sam should have known that Xiang Yang was the Queen because he lied. However Sam had a different conclusion. Since he held number 1, he thought Xiang Yang lied to protect him. That made sense too. Sam himself lied too, to protect himself. He said he was half of another player, whom I later worked out to be the 8. So I thought he must be the 4. 

It was great to see people having fun and much discussion over a game of Snow White. 

Younger daughter Chen Rui used to play the computer game Stardew Valley. I saw this but did not play it. It is a cooperative game for up to 4 players. 

Stardew Valley

I taught Leaf my game Dancing Queen.

Workers and a tourist from Shackleton Base.

I managed to bring Olenon to the table. A microgame and climbing game from Japan, with an interesting twist.

Coco Boom was a blast. This is a game from Taiwan. Leaf got three of the four bombs, which meant her points were in the negative. This game is so simple yet there is so much fun and excitement. 

I saw but did not play.

Babylon looks great!

Sunday late afternoon was the announcement of prize winners and lucky draws. My game Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was one of the prizes. 

Dith taught 1849 to a few players who had not played 18XX games before and were curious to explore. Recruitment drive for 18XX!  

I remember Taj Mahal for how brutal it can be. I had not played it for a long time, and wanted to bring it back to the table. This is an older title from Reiner Knizia. 

We did a three player game. With three players it is slightly easier. I remember four players is the ideal player count. At five players it would be truly brutal. Since I own the game and I have played it before, I had an advantage over the others. I had a large collection of goods and that advantage snowballed. It was difficult for others to catch up. However they did manage to establish wide networks and scored many points from them. 

In Taj Mahal it is important to know how to pick your fights. You must conserve your resources. 

Orloj is a game about the astronomical clock in Prague, Czech Republic. I saw this being played but I did not play it myself. The game seems to be quite long. The group started in the morning, paused for lunch, then continued in the afternoon. Han said learning the game took much time, but the game mechanisms themselves were not that complicated. 

Orloj

Player board in Orloj. I tend to be wary of heavy Eurogames nowadays. I find many of them tedious and samey. That was why I didn't sign up for Orloj. I hadn't actually read up much about it so I did not know what to expect. It just looked like that kind of game I generally avoid. Maybe I'm judging it too soon. 

I brought Beowulf, another Reiner Knizia title. I have not played this all that many times. I remember it as kind of okay but nothing spectacular. However this game we did was a lot of fun. Many of us pushed our luck far, and succeeded. It was hilarious. When everyone gambles, luck becomes a bigger factor. We certainly had some who were more lucky than others. Still, we all had fun. 

The Beowulf figure

When Ainul first saw the board, he thought it was modular and could be customised. The game board really looks like this, like it is missing a section. To use the least exciting way to describe the game, this is just a fixed series of auctions and actions where you collect and play cards, and gain gold, wounds, and victory points. We had five players, and I think this is the best player count. Auctions can be unforgiving. Sometimes if you come last you will suffer bad penalties. 

At major auctions, players will collect these tokens numbered 1 to 5, depending on how long they can last. The first person not willing to bid will drop off and take the 5 token. The next person to drop off takes the 4, and so on. Once everyone has a token, the player with the number 1 token gets to pick a reward first. The "rewards" are not all good. Some of them are penalties. 

When you need to play cards with certain icons, you can choose to take a risk to draw free cards even if you do have the right cards in hand. When you take such a risk, you draw two cards from the deck and see if they have the required icons. If they do, you play these cards for free, conserving your own hand cards. However if there is none, you fail and drop off from the auction, and you also take a scratch (a minor wound). 

11 icons is a crazy high number. I'm glad I decided to play Beowulf again, and I'm grateful we had the full 5 players. This was one great experience I had at the retreat. 

This was another game I managed to bring to the table. 

I don't think I have ever won a game of The Great Zimbabwe. We had a five player game, the max. 

I went with a money first approach. I took a god which gave me money every round. I also took a specialist which let me deposit money for a 50% interest rate every round. I was aggressive in taking cards, which increased my victory requirement. 

Cindy took the god which let her collect all money spent on using monuments as transportation hubs. This made her a ton of money, and at the same time denied all of us a side income. I think this god is powerful in the late game, and also when there are more players. It is also powerful when there are few rivers or they are not well connected. Han took the god which let him use an exhausted resource a second time. This didn't seem like much in the early game, but this was critical in the late game. It helped him win the game. The late game is often about fighting for turn order. Everyone is fighting for resources in order to be able to upgrade monuments. If you are late in turn order, or sometimes even when you are just not first in turn order, you will lose because the resources your need are depleted by the time it is your turn. Han's pick of his god is a long-term strategy, helping him greatly in the final rounds. He didn't need to worry about resources being depleted. 

On the point scoring board, the cubes are the points, and the discs are the victory requirements. 

That red Level-1 monument could be squeezed between the green Level-2 and white Level-4 monuments because of a specialist power which let Xiang Yang (red) break the monument placement rules. 

Our game took about 3 hours

One thing strange about Tribune is the box is slightly larger than the standard square box. It sits weird on my shelf because of this. My copy is an older edition. The newer edition has a different cover. 

You place workers to collect cards and then you use cards to wrest for control of the six factions in the game. There are several objectives in the game, and you must fulfil a certain number to trigger the end of the game. If you are the only player fulfilling the required number, you automatically win. However, if multiple players achieve this, you need to do point calculation to see who wins. 

We had a full 5-player game. Xiu Yi was first to get a Tribune, the hardest objective and also a mandatory objective, which meant he was closest to victory. At that point the other four of us immediately united to try to stop him, turning the game into a 4-vs-1. He could have won anyway. We discovered that in a particular round, had he just put all his pawns into the money bowl, he would have collected enough money to fulfil the $30 objective and thus win the game. In the subsequent round, that was what he did. However, in that round, both Dith and I managed to get Tribunes too, and we also achieved the required number of objectives. So it came down to victory points. Dith had the most, and thus he won the game. Tribune does not have any single thing that makes it particularly striking, but it does work very well as a whole. I'm glad I kept it in my collection. 

The natural wood pawn is showing obvious signs of age. 

Over the three days, I had 25 plays of 24 different games. 14 were new to me: Steam Power, Burst, Blood on the Clocktower, Fishing, Cthulhu Wars, Karakorum, Wine Cellar, 5 Towers, Just One, The Rich and the Good (Hab & Gut), The Gang, Little Fighters 2, Diced Veggies, Shackleton Base. My most memorable experience was Blood on the Clocktower. The simplest way to describe this game is this is an improved and more complex version of Werewolf. This type of game is usually not my thing, but I really enjoyed our session. Now I have a huge to-do list for my blog. So many new games to write about and so many photos to share. 

The BGC retreat was a great getaway for me. I enjoyed myself playing so many different games, without any worry on my mind. There were lots of games and lots of fellow gamers to play with. It's a bit weird to refer to The Great Zimbabwe as simple fun. I must say that it is important that despite our busy work and life schedules, we make time for simple fun. We make time for small things we do for pure enjoyment.