Hardback

Hardback can be quickly described as Scrabble meets deck-building. It’s a neat idea. I wondered whether there has already been other deck-building word games, so I did a quick search and found a few. Hardback itself is a reimplementation of a 2014 game called Paperback. That is apt indeed. Upgrades, folks! 

Here’s the basic idea. Every turn you draw five new cards from your personal deck. Every card is a letter of the alphabet. You try to make a word with your cards. If you manage it, you gain the benefits on every card. It can be points. It can be money which you can then spend to buy new cards for your deck. There are also other powers. You can flip some cards face down. When you do this, that card becomes wild. Often you need to do this to be able to make a word. However you won’t enjoy the benefits from face-down cards. You don’t need to use every card. You can discard some. Naturally you don’t get benefits from unused cards either. You don't save money from turn to turn. Leftover money will be used to buy ink. 

This above is an example of how I spelled PERIL. In hindsight, I should have spelled PRUNE, making the L wild instead. It would have given me an extra point from the U.  

Throughout the game you will buy new cards for your deck to augment it. You may remove cards from your deck too. Newer cards are generally more powerful and help you score points more efficiently. The game ends at the end of a round when someone reaches 60 points. 

The core idea is simple. Here are some mechanisms which make the game more interesting. In addition to the basic cards, there are also genre cards in four types - horror, romance, adventure, and mystery. These are all better than the basic cards, and each type provides some unique bonuses. The powers of genre cards usually have two parts. One part will be activated as long as you use the card in your word. The second part will also be activated if you have another card of the same genre in use. What this means is you probably want to specialise in one or two genres so that the chances of you drawing two or more cards of the same genre are higher. 

One card power lets you double the point or money value of an adjacent card. If you manage to pair this with a high valued card, it becomes a huge bonus. One card power lets you reserve a card in the purchase pool. Since this is a deck-building game, there is also a power which removes weak cards from your deck, so that your chances of drawing strong hands increase. 

One mechanism which I find a lot of fun is the ink and ink remover mechanism. At the end of every turn you can decide to spend some of your money to buy ink. You spend ink to draw more cards. This way you can make words longer than five letters. This means you can earn more money and score more points within the same turn. In the game, there is a bonus for having made the longest word. There is some risk though. A card you draw using ink must be used in your word. It cannot be turned face-down to become a wild card nor can it be discarded. If you are unlucky, you may be forced to pass because you can't make a word. You waste a turn. Here’s how the ink remover might save you. This is a rare resource. You can use it to turn a card drawn using ink into a normal card. That means you are not forced to use it and you can flip it face-down to become wild.  

In this example above, the B and O are of the same genre, and the Y and D are of another. This means I am able to use both the basic power and the genre power of these cards. The G and U are wild. I need to flip the L and the C to become G and U respectively. It is always satisfying to be able to spell long words. 

There's one mechanism called timeless classics. These are cards which have their letters in landscape instead of portrait orientation. You can see an example in the screenshot above - the V. When you are able to make a word using a timeless classic card, it stays in front of you and gives you benefits every round, regardless of whether you are able to use it in future words. Your opponents can force you to discard such timeless classics by making a word including your letter. They don't gain anything from your letter though. They only force you to discard your letter. 

I had much fun with Hardback. It is certainly something different from what I usually play. The deck-building and card power parts might feel a little complex to non-gamers, so if you are using the word game premise to lure them to play, do be a little patient in explaining these aspects. I like that this is a game in which you can ask your opponents to help you make a word. They will get a small reward. It is satisfying to be able to puzzle out a decent word. The option to turn cards wild offers much flexibility to players. This will work as a family game. Although adults will have an advantage over children, being able to help one another with making words can turn this into an educational game at the same time. Even when you play with friends, you might learn some new words from them. 

Monolyth

Monolyth is a design from Phil Walker-Harding. This guy again! Why do I keep coming across his games? He is truly prolific! In Monolyth you collect bricks in various shapes to build a monument block. In the process there are several ways you will score points. The game ends when a player completes his monument. 

At the start of the game bricks are randomly set up around the board. A shared pawn is placed at one of the spots. On your turn you must move the pawn between 1 to 4 steps, then claim the brick where it stops. You immediately refill that spot with a random brick from the box. 

You have your own little player board. This is where you build your own monument. Each of the four sides has a designated colour. You try to match your bricks on each side to the corresponding colour, because this will help you score points.

From another angle

The point tokens on the main game board come in three different shapes, each associated with a different scoring method. For every game one design card is randomly drawn (that square card above). If you are able to create that exact design while building your monument, you claim one square score token. Naturally you will claim the highest one available at that time. Using this card above as an example, the design you need to make is one complete layer of bricks and one complete wall on just one side. 

The hexagonal score tokens can be claimed whenever you complete one layer of your monument. You always take the highest valued token still available. The last type looks like a seashell. You don't claim these by fulfilling any criteria. Instead, you have to forfeit a turn to claim one. You don't necessarily take the highest valued token available. You get to choose. You attach the seashell token to one of the four sides of your player board (see below). By game end, if the number of squares on that side matching the designated colour is at least as many as the number on the seashell token, you score the token. If the requirement is not met, that seashell token is wasted. 

Seashell tokens are limited in quantity, so you have to fight for them. In a 4-player game, you can build at most three layers high, so my black side can score at best 8 points. I have maximised my seashell score. If there is no more 8 by the time I take a seashell, I would have to settle for a lower value. 

When taking a brick, you can choose to discard the one you are supposed to take and claim a small single-unit cube in the same colour. These are limited. They are not an efficient way to build your monument, but they are flexible. Sometimes they are your best choice. 

Monolyth is easy to learn. It works well as a family game, and it is a visually-appealing gateway game. The rules are all intuitive and it is a pleasure to learn to play. There are only three ways to score points, and they are all straight-forward. The most important player interaction is making sure you don't set up great options for the next player. You can see your opponents' structures and what they need. Sometimes you think not just about the next player, but also those after that. In fact in our game we all watched out for the leading player and worked together to avoid giving him his ideal piece. One tactic you can use is spending the turn taking a seashell token so that the pawn doesn't move. The seashell tokens often present a dilemma. How soon should you start claiming them? If you are overly ambitious you might fail and waste your tokens. But if you are slow, you lose out on the good tokens. You can choose to take a seashell token even when you know you can't score it, for the sake of denying others. That's evil, but it's legal. 

River of Gold

This is a heavy Eurogame. You play merchant families trading along the River of Gold and establishing influence as you do so. You have two trading ships sailing downstream, stopping to earn money and load goods. You can supply goods to clients. This is your typical order fulfilment mechanism. You can also build trading houses along the riverbank. Trading houses offer benefits to all ships which stop by. The owner also gains benefits whenever the house is visited. So these are the three main things you do - you sail, you fulfil client orders, and you build trading houses. The game ends when the trading house deck runs out. Highest scorer wins. 

The game board looks like this. There are many plots along both banks where you can build trading houses. The game starts with some already built. When you sail, the space where you stop will always touch four plots, possibly some with trading houses built. You'll get stuff from all the trading houses. You will also get $1 from each empty plot. So the worst case is you earn $4. You only sail downstream. If you reach the river mouth, you cycle back to the top and continue from there. 

The river is divided into six segments representing six different provinces. When you pay to build a trading house, you will be able to increase your influence in the corresponding province. At the end of the game, you compare your influence against others at all six provinces, and you score points based on relative position. When your influence reaches certain milestones, you also get to claim benefits. Influence is one reason you want to build trading houses. With the house you have built, you also hope that others will visit so that you can earn the owner's income. You can visit your own house. This way you earn both the visitor's income and the owner's income. Sometimes players naturally build houses close to one another, because such clusters are attractive to ship owners. Ships want to stop where they can reap the greatest rewards. If you want people to visit your house, you want to make it irresistible. 

Those tables on the right are for keeping track of everyone's influence at each province. The point values for the most influential players are listed here. 

One interesting mechanism in the game is your action is restricted by a die roll. You always roll a die before the start of your turn. The die roll determines where you can sail, where you can build a trading house, and which client you can deliver goods to. The die is numbered 1 to 6, so if you want to sail, you pick one of your two ships, and it sails as many steps as indicated by the die. It is possible to adjust the die value. You need to spend divine favour to do this. Divine favour is a type of resource. When you decide to build a trading house, the die value determines which province you can build in. When you decide to deliver goods to a client, the die value also determines which client you can deliver to. Every client is associated with a die value. You can only serve a client if you have rolled that die value. Thankfully you can always spend divine favour to adjust your die value before you perform your action. 

You always have two client cards in hand. When you successfully serve a client, you get to draw two more client cards and then you discard one. When you serve a client, they usually give you a one-time benefit, an ongoing benefit, and also bonus points at game end based on a specific criteria. 

In the top half of this screenshot above, you can see three missions. You get to score points when you complete them. The missions are, from left to right, serving clients of three different types, reaching a specific influence level in a province, and building all four types of trading houses. The game gives you yet another aspect to consider and plan for as you play. 

These are the currently available trading houses you can build. The icon in the pointy half is the visitor income, and the icon in the flat half is the owner income. The black banner in the middle means how much influence you will gain for building the trading house. 

Influence track for Province #6

River of Gold looks more complicated than it actually is. There may be many aspects for you to think about, but every turn you are only choosing one out of three options - sail, build or deliver. Sailing helps you gain money and goods, while building and delivering require spending money and goods respectively. 

It is interesting to watch how players collectively develop the board. There is an uneasy balance between helping yourself and creating opportunities for others. You do want others to visit your trading houses, so that you get income, but at the same time you are hoping you won't help them too much. Your customers are ultimately your competitors too. When you sail and visit others' trading houses, you will also feel a little torn. You want to gain the benefits from the trading houses, and you have to grudgingly accept that the house owners will gain something too from you visiting. I find this delicious. 

One feeling I get when playing this game is happy times fly by too fast. The game always seems to end earlier than I expect it to. The trading houses run out so quickly! I feel there are still many empty plots along the riverbank. I feel I can compete more. I think this play experience means the game is well designed and well balanced. It makes you feel just on the cusp of greatness, and that's when the game ends - on a high note. 

Thailand Board Game Show 2025: Quick Takes Part 3

This is the third batch of games I saw at the Thailand Board Game Show 2025. There are several others I played in full, and I will write about those as individual blog posts. 

Death Invitation is a hidden identity game. You have a murderer and an accomplice on one team, and the rest are the other team - the innocent. To win, the murderer needs to kill everyone. The innocent have several ways to win. They can try to kill the murderer, but if they kill the wrong guy, they immediately lose. They can find the secret passageway and escape. They can also find fuel for the car and drive away. In order to exchange information, you need to be alone with one other person in the same room. The risk is that person may turn out to be the murderer. The murderer does not lose for getting exposed. It's a little inconvenient to lose your anonymity, but it also means you can now blatantly hunt down your victims. The accomplice can be crucial in creating confusion. The accomplice may murder exactly once. When someone dies, the murderer must be nearby. So the accomplice murdering at the right time and place can effectively mislead the innocent. 

Everyone knows what kind of equipment everyone else is carrying. When someone is killed, you can tell from the wound what kind of equipment was used for the murder. This is a clue for you to narrow down who the murderer might be. 

Death Invitation is a Thai design

The Yellow House is not a Thai design. It calls itself a two-player trick-taking game, but after reading the rules I still don't quite understand how it is trick-taking. This is a game about Van Gogh and his friend Gauguin debating about what's most important to an artist - inspiration, passion, skill or money. These four topics are just the four suits in the game. 

The game board is made of cloth

The cards have suits, but no numbers. I don't fully understand the game mechanism even after reading the rules. I did not sit down to play. The game is played over several rounds. You win the game by winning three debates, or by winning two debates of the same suit. You start a round with 12 cards. You take turns supporting one topic. You need to play cards in that suit to be able to do so. Your opponent must then support a new topic by being able to play enough cards in that new suit. If he can't, you win the round. There are only four topics, so there will be at most four turns in a round. The player who is able to argue for the fourth topic automatically wins the round. Or if you are able to play all 12 cards, you win the round too. The rules look simple, but I still can't fully picture how the game works. I am curious. 

Tilt N Shout is a 2-player real-time game which requires speed thinking. It comes with a stack of cards, and every card specifies a category, like vegetables, countries, historical leaders. When you start a game, you reveal such a card, and the players take turns naming something in the category without repeating. You want to do this as quickly as possible. 

The main game component is a see-saw with a winding path. At the centre there is a hole where you can drop the metal ball. This is the starting position of the ball. When you name an item, you press your end of the see-saw down, so that the ball starts rolling in your direction. Your opponent now tries to name a new item, so that he can quickly tap his side, and make the ball roll towards him. You are fighting for that ball. When it reaches your end and drops out of the see-saw, you win. If the category is Malaysian food, you'd be saying things like satay, nasi lemak, Hokkien mee, panmee, Ipoh horfun, banana leaf rice. 

This is an exciting and nerve-wracking game. Sometimes your mind goes completely blank. 

On the verge of winning

Political Mess is published in Thai, but this is a game from Daryl Chow (Singapore). This is a small box card game for 2 to 4 players. 

When you play a card, it must overlap at least one other card. There are some rules you must follow. Empty spaces can be covered by monuments (those yellow structures), politicians or other empty spaces. Monuments and politicians can only be covered by matching monuments or politicians. It's not exactly easy to play a card, because overlapping is mandatory, and there are restrictions about what you can cover. 

When the game ends, you score every group of monuments. You check who has the most and second most number of politicians next to the group. You decide on your player colour at the start of the game. Whoever has the most politicians next to the group scores as many points as the number of monuments. Whoever has the second most scores half that. In the case of ties, the politicians with plus signs are tiebreakers. 

I played this at the airport on the airport bench. This is a microgame but it is pretty thinky. 

TGI Friday!

There has been a 7 year gap since my previous play of Friday. I needed to reread the whole rulebook when I picked up the game again recently. I have written about the game before (in 2012!), so I won't repeat. You can read the write-up here. 

Lately I am playing boardgames mostly online, so it's good to play a physical game once in a while so that I don't lose touch with my roots. Friday is a solo game, so I don't get to sit opposite a physical opponent. However it still feels nice to be shuffling cards and fiddling with game components. Even the chore of packing the game away makes me feel good. Feels human. 

I played two games, and lost both. In the first game I didn't even manage to reach the pirates. I was already eaten by wild animals on the island. I did a little better in the second game. I reached the pirates, and even defeated the first one. Unfortunately the second one got me. 

This was the pirate I lost to. I had too few life points left - not enough to draw more cards to beat the pirate. 

Thailand Board Game Show 2025: Quick Takes Part 2

These are some more games I saw at the Thailand Board Game Show 2025. 

Barbaric is a Thai design, a tactical battle game. 

It has a ton of pretty miniatures.

Those at the centre are the monsters. Those near the edges are playable characters. You goal is to go to the centre to take a treasure and then bring it out to the edge. You don't necessarily have to defeat the monsters. You don't even need to be first to grab the treasure. If someone takes it and then drops it due to being smacked by a monster. You can conveniently swoop in to pick it up and bring it to the edge yourself to win. 

You get to choose a combination of character and mount. Every character and every mount is different. 

This is another character / mount combination.

This is a player board, with character info on the left, and mount on the right

This is actually made of two pieces. This allows you to make different combinations.

The character board of the boss monster

Many Thai games have impressive production quality. This is certainly international standard. One thing I learned this trip is that like Malaysia, Kickstarter does not support Thailand either. We are both blacklisted. For Thai designers to go Kickstarter, they need to partner with someone from another country. Probably most often Singapore. 

This is a game about pottery, and it is still at the prototype stage. This is designed by one of my assistants from last year, Tree (Surakit Joradol). He designed this for the pottery school where he works. This cover certainly caught my attention. 

This is a worker placement and resource collection game. When you compete for turn order, the earlier you want to go, the more you will have to pay to buy stuff. 

This part is contract fulfilment. There are different types of pottery you can make. When you complete certain sets, you will score bonus points. 

Viking See-Saw is a dexterity game from Reiner Knizia. 

Everyone starts with the same number of pieces. These are goods you need to load onto the ship. The ship starts with some wooden blocks. On your turn, you must place one of your pieces onto the higher half of the ship. 

If you manage to place your piece without causing the ship to tilt the other way, you're safe. If the ship tilts, you will be penalised. You must take one wooden piece from the ship. If goods fall off when you attempt to add a piece, you have to take them all, in addition to taking one wooden piece. 

The game ends when all the wooden blocks on the ship have been taken. The player with the fewest pieces remaining wins. Those wooden blocks count too. At first I thought that blue hair band was one of the pieces to be placed too. It was just to stop the ball from rolling all over the place. 

Little Dot Garden has the kind of cover which is love at first sight. 

You have your own player board and you will plant flowers on it. You claim tiles from the centre of the table to place on your player board. These tiles have flowers in four different types. At the end of the game, for each flower type you check which connected region on your board is the largest. You will score each of these largest regions. The value of each flower type increases throughout the game depending on player actions. So this is a market value manipulation game. You collect flowers and increase their values at the same time. You want to collect the most valuable flowers. You also want to increase the value of the flower type you have the most of.

These lovely ladybirds are the currency in the game. When you place a tile, if you need to cover an object, you must pay a ladybird. After I listened to the rules explanation, the game did not excite me as much. It was Jon who was accompanying me who found it intriguing. I told him - buy buy buy! Too bad the game wasn't available yet. It was still in pre-order stage. 

Tanbo is a brain-burning abstract game from Japan. It is an award winner. 

This is a 2-player game. You have your own set of components. During setup you create five rice fields divided by the dikes. Each field starts with two snakes. You have one farmer pawn. On your turn, you pick up all the pieces in the field where the farmer is and then redistribute them one by one in clockwise order from the next field onwards. In other words, congkak / mancala style. Once this is done, you examine the field where the farmer is now located, and perform actions according to the number of snakes and rice. 

This reference sheet lists all possible situations at a field and what you must do.

The game was a little hard to grasp initially. I think it was due to the way it was taught to us. Before being explained the five different scenarios, I had to start playing. The goal of the game is to harvest rice of a total value of 25. The rice pieces have values ranging from 3 to 5. Whenever you get to grow rice in your play area, you draw pieces randomly from a bag.

In this game snakes are not pests. They help with the rice growing. When you have more snakes than rice, you get to add rice pieces until they equal the number of snakes. When you have more rice than snakes, you get to harvest the difference. There are several other possible situations and required actions. You must plan your moves to maximise the opportunities for harvesting rice. 

This is a perfect information abstract game, and both players start with the exact same setup. There is no randomness other than the value of rice you draw from the bag. This is mostly a solo game, since you don't interact with your opponent.