Rumble Nation

Rumble Nation is a game from Japan by Yogi Shinichi. It is an area majority game. It simple and short, and very clever too. The game is about preparing for war. What you do is just deploying troops. The war only happens at the end of the game. The war is actually the end game scoring. 

There are 11 regions in this stylised map of medieval Japan. During game setup, chips numbered 2 to 12 are randomly placed. These are the point values, the region numbering, and also the sequence in which battles will be fought. The battle winner claims the chip. In 3 or 4 player games, the second placed player claims a chip which is half the region value. 

Every player has the same number of soldiers. The game is played until everyone has placed all their soldiers. On your turn, you roll three dice. You have to add two of them to determine where you will place soldiers (i.e. region number), and the third die determines how many soldiers you will place (between 1 to 3, because you half the die value). So there is some luck in terms of where you are able to place soldiers, but you do have some options. Also you have one chance to reroll if you absolutely hate your first roll. If you are first to use up your soldiers, you claim the most powerful sword, which is a tiebreaker during battles. The earlier you finish deployment, the stronger you are in tiebreaking. 

When the deployment ends and the war starts, battles are resolved based on simple majority. What's special is whenever you win a battle, if you have soldiers in any adjacent regions where battle hasn't started, they all get reinforcements. This can help you win those later battles. Although the earlier regions are not worth much, they may give you valuable reinforcements to help you win those later and more valuable regions. There can be chain reactions too. 

Once per game instead of using dice to deploy soldiers, you may claim and use one of the tactic cards in the game. These are randomly set up at the start of the game and they are visible to all. These cards let you manipulate soldiers in various ways. Some let you move enemy soldiers too. 

During the game you will be playing out the war in your mind many times. If I deploy here and I win this battle, I will get more troops there and there, and this will help me win those battles too. The map is open information so you can do all these calculations in your head. There is some tension in how quickly you want to use up your soldiers. I feel generally it is advantageous to see where others commit their forces before you deploy yours, so that you can concede where you can't win and utilise your soldiers better. Yet, the tiebreaker advantage when you finish deployment early can be crucial. What a juicy dilemma! 

You don't have direct control over where you get to place troops. Sometimes you have no good options. The die roll may force you to place too many soldiers somewhere you are already certain to win. This means wasting your soldiers. Generally I find you have interesting decisions to make. I think it is a nice balance. You have some but not too many options that would give you analysis paralysis. There are only so three ways you can group two out of three dice. 

Rumble Nation is a delight to play. It is the kind of game that puts Japanese designs on the map. Minimalistic but smart. The game is doing well. It has gone through several editions. Battles are deterministic, so that aspect may feel a little dry. However your deployment is dependent on die rolls. Although this is a perfect information game, it doesn't feel like the typical abstract game due to the uncertainty in the dice. You will be holding your breath too when your opponents roll their dice. 

Jump Drive

Jump Drive is the easy version of Race for the Galaxy, by the same designer Tom Lehmann. Race for the Galaxy is one of my favourite games. Many people complain about the many icons and how hard they are to learn. I guess they are a little intimidating at first, but once you understand the general principles in the game, they are manageable. You don't really read the icons. You just need to understand the key rules. Then the icons become reminders for what the card powers are. For any more complicated card powers, there is text on the card you can read. To me the icons are functional and practical. 

Jump Drive has been around for some time. I've never had any urge to try it, since I'm comfortable with Race for the Galaxy. I don't need a kiddie version. Sorry I sound nasty calling this a kiddie version. It is a different game, and it could have been given a wholly different theme, and be an independent game. It is quicker and more straight-forward than Race for the Galaxy. 

Jump Drive is a card game. It is set in the future, when humankind has just invented jump drives which allow interstellar travel. This is a tableau game where you will play cards into your own area. Cards mostly help you draw more cards every turn, or score points every turn. The game ends when someone has 50 points or more. Think of this as a snowball game. As you add more and more cards which score points to your tableau, the points you score every turn snowballs. There is an exciting acceleration which you are trying to achieve, almost like achieving terminal velocity to launch yourself into outer space. 

Every turn you may play one or two cards, and if you don't, you do something called explore, which is to draw several cards then discard some, so that you get a net of two more cards. The explore action basically helps you find good cards you can play. When playing a card, you have to pay for it using other cards from your hand. Cards in the game are either worlds (i.e. planets) or developments (i.e. technologies). If you play just one world, you get a rebate of 1 card. If you play just one development, you get a discount of 1 card. However if you want to play one world and one development, there is no rebate or discount. You need to be able to afford them. Some worlds are military worlds. You don't pay for them, however you need to have accumulated enough military strength from existing cards in your tableau. 

Cards you manage to play give you various abilities, and the most common two are income and victory points. Income means cards you get to draw every turn. Victory points are generated every turn too. Some cards have other abilities, but there aren't that many different powers in the game. So this is a pretty straight-forward game. 

This screenshot from BoardGameArena.com shows the cards we have played every turn. The asterisk icon means no cards were played, i.e. an exploration was done. Usually you try to play at least one card every turn, but sometimes you can't afford one. If you are familiar with Race for the Galaxy, one difference you'll notice is that duplicate cards are allowed. Most if not all of the art is from other games in the Race for the Galaxy universe. I have played so much of Race for the Galaxy that I'd prefer Jump Drive to have a different theme and use different art, because it's a good game in itself despite sharing several similarities. The same art makes me compare it to Race for the Galaxy, and when I do that, Jump Drive feels like, well, a kiddie version. And that's not fair at all. 

This Rosetta Stone World is probably the most complex a card can be in Jump Drive. This is a compact and fast card game. You must play efficiently, because otherwise the acceleration will catch you unprepared. You build your tempo to achieve terminal velocity. There is no direct player interaction, but watching your opponents' tempos is important. If they are rushing, you don't want to be left behind, or you need to prepare for a powerful enough boost to be able to overtake them. Players may surpass 50 on the same turn. When that happens, you want to have a more powerful engine so that you score more than everyone else. 

clearing my game collection

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Sorry, Chen Gong

I made Zhou Yu a moustachioed guy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASS

PASS from Taiwan is a climbing game, i.e. like Tichu, Big 2 and Fight the Landlord. One special aspect about it is the cards have two different halves. Well, actually this is no longer that unique by now. Several other popular games have this, for example SCOUT and Panda Spin. 

Like Panda Spin, in PASS, one end of a card is designated the basic side, and the other is the upgraded side. By default you can only use the basic side. So you hold the cards white side up. 

Most of the game is the same as common climbing games, so this is easy to learn. There is no concept of suits, thus there are no suit related combos like flushes or straight flushes. The game has bombs, i.e. four or five of a kind. Bombs can ignore combos. Normally in climbing games everyone may only play the same combo as the lead player. In PASS, if you play a bomb, you are allowed to break this rule. 

The main difference between PASS and other climbing games is the Pass tokens. When you pass, you get a token. You may not re-enter play and you must sit out the rest of the hand, until someone wins and starts a new hand. Pass tokens can be used in two ways. When you play a combo, if you want to rotate some of your cards to the upgraded side, you have to spend a Pass token. 

Referring to the photo above, if I spend a Pass token, I can turn around my Q and A to create a bomb of five 4's. The other way to use a Pass token is to augment a combo you play. Normally if your combo in hand is the same as the currently strongest combo on the table, you can't play it. You need something stronger. What you can do is attach a Pass token to augment your combo. If the combo on the table already has a Pass token, you can still play yours, by adding two Pass tokens. 

The two sides of the Pass tokens are different, to remind you of the two different functions.

Compared to SCOUT and Panda Spin, PASS is a simpler game and it is closer to common climbing games. This means it is easier for non-gamers to pick up. Gameplay is quicker. I am not specifically a climbing game fan, but I like all three games. SCOUT and Panda Spin are more radically unconventional and innovative, and the gamer in me like that. PASS is more in the comfort zone. It is familiar and soothing while offering a little twist. It's the kind of game you can easily teach your old friends who are not gamers, and you can have a relaxing evening playing and catching up at the same time. 

Gatsby

Gatsby is a light 2-player game about trying to gain the favours of the rich and famous. There are 15 characters in the game, three each in five different colours. However each time you play, a few are removed unseen. To win, you need to collect three characters of the same colour, or five characters of different colours. If no one achieves either condition, you compare total point values of characters you manage to collect. 

The fun part of the game is that some characters are face-down. You don’t know which characters are in play. You need to take a specific action to peek at and possibly swap the positions of characters. You play on three different boards, and there are characters on all three. You place or move your markers on these boards in order to win characters. 

There are four action tiles which let you perform different combinations of actions on the three boards. You share a common disc with your opponent. On your turn you move the disc to a new action tile and perform the corresponding actions. What this means is you are also preventing your opponent from performing that action, because he must move the disc when his turn comes. 

The three boards work differently. There are five tracks on the race course board. You fill them from left to right. When a track is full, whoever has more markers wins the character. At the dance floor, which is a square grid, you win characters when your markers connect two edges and when you occupy four specific spaces. At the tower building, you win characters when you reach specific levels. One interesting twist here is whoever is behind moves two steps at a time. 

The general mechanisms of the three boards do not make an interesting enough game. What makes the game fun is the special powers on some of the spaces. Some let you peek at and swap characters. Some let you swap markers with your opponent. Some let you specify which action tile your opponent must use next. Some let you draw a special single-use action tile which is only available to you. These special action tiles can be very powerful. One dilemma you often have is when you place your marker on a space, you are making adjacent spaces accessible to your opponent, and these newly accessible spaces may have useful special powers. 

The game is a tug of war with three arenas you need to compete in. Tension comes from the unknown characters. You need to figure out which are in play because it affects your strategy and you also need to know that to stop your opponent from winning. Due to this hidden information, you can have psychological play, trying to mislead your opponent. There are also clever action combos you can make. These are fun tactical plays which make you feel smart. 

Tales of the Old Fort (勇闯旧城记)

 

This is a game I bought at the Kaohsiung City Museum in Taiwan. Tales of the Old Fort is the name I give it, an approximate translation of the original Chinese name. I bought this game more as a souvenir than as a boardgame. The old fort refers to Zuoying, a district right next to the city of Kaohsiung. This was a military base, from the Ming Dynasty up to the Second World War. Tales of the Old Fort is real history being presented in boardgame form. 

Back of the box

Game board

Action cards

These character cards are used only in the advanced rules. There are two modes of play. In the basic mode, you play a cooperative game. You construct the walls and the buildings together, and do your best to survive the historical incidents. As a team you try to score as many points as possible. The advanced game is competitive. Instead of working together on a team score, you have individual scores. You score points in different ways, and you win by scoring more than everyone else. 

Event cards

There are four types of building materials. They must be built in the right order - green, grey, yellow then red. You can skip some of them, even directly going to red. However there is a game mechanism which discourages you from doing too much skipping. 

These are some of the buildings you need to construct. Grey means not yet built, and orange means completed. The requirements for constructing a building are in the bottom left corners of the building tiles. The requirements are in the form of what the two adjacent wall sections must be made of. The game board is divided into four quadrants, and each quadrant is adjacent to two wall sections. To construct a building, you don't need to pay resources. You just need the two adjacent wall sections to fit the requirements. This is why you will often be constructing walls without skipping colours. 

Here you can see the player pawns, a gate, damage tokens, and an era token. Event cards in the game are generally bad. Usually you get attacked from one or more directions, and the enemies attack at specific strengths. If the walls are not strong enough to repel the attackers, they get damaged, and buildings in the fort may get damaged too. Damaged walls have zero strength, and when a wall piece takes a second damage token, it is destroyed. Damaged buildings score no points. You need to repair them to remove the damage tokens. 

Box front

A game is set up like this. You have the four gates, but no walls yet. All fourteen buildings are placed in their designated quadrants, with their not-yet-built side showing. 

You set up four sets of event cards. The lighter back cards are regular events, and the darker back cards are major events. Each game you will use all the regular events. There are two or three major events for the four eras in the game. You randomly pick one for each era face-down, so you don't know yet which one it will be. 

This is one part of the game I want to complain about. The setup rules say four stacks of regular event cards, but the game comes with regular event cards of only three eras. There are no Era 4 regular event cards. I checked the component count section of the rulebook, and it says 18 cards. There are indeed 18 regular event cards, six each for Eras 1 to 3. So I believe this is an error in game and product design, not in manufacturing or packing. My solution is I divide the regular event cards into four decks as evenly as I can. 

You draw an event card whenever you construct a building. So you should prepare yourselves well before constructing buildings, i.e. get some walls up first. There are four large buildings in the game. When you construct one, you draw a major event card, and you also proceed to the next era. That means the next time you draw a regular event card, it comes from the next deck. These regular event cards will have stronger effects. Brace yourselves! 

Your have a hand size of two action cards. The action card deck is a countdown mechanism. If it runs out, the game ends. This is just one way the game ends, and this is the bad way. It means you run out of time. Normally you want to end the game by constructing the last large building and triggering the final major event. 

Most actions in the game require playing or discarding a card, and then drawing one. You have some time pressure to get as much done as possible before the deck runs out. Player pawns can only stand at the gates. Depending on which of the four gates you are at, you can work on either of the walls next to the gate, or buildings in the two quadrants next to the gate. If you want to move to an adjacent gate, you have to discard a card. Cards are mostly building materials, with a few special action cards which only take effect if you discard them for movement. To use a building material card for building or upgrading a wall, you need one action to place the card next to the wall site, and then another to actually build. Repairing a wall or building costs one card. Ironically constructing a building doesn't cost any card. You just need to make sure the wall type requirements are met. 

When I first read the rules, I did not have high hopes. I had a nagging feeling this was amateur. It didn't seem like a game made by experienced gamers. The rulebook was not clear on several things. Now that I have played the game, it is not a complex game, but when I first read the rules, I felt I kind of know how to play, but I wasn't 100% confident. 

I played with my daughters Shee Yun and Chen Rui. I thought the game was going to be a breeze, but we failed pretty spectacularly. The first building we constructed was a large building, because it had a special ability. This meant triggering a major event, and it also meant progressing to the second era, where the event cards are stronger. Needless to say, constructing that large building was a horrible move. We weren't thinking straight. We were overly keen to construct buildings with powers. We found out the hard way that this is a game about raising walls and preparing yourselves well before you construct buildings and allow events to happen. Events only trigger when you construct buildings, which means you can delay them. 

We had tons of damage tokens on the board. We also found out we played several rules wrong. Perhaps I am partly to blame, because I am not used to reading rules in Chinese. Most of my games are in English. However there are certainly some parts where the rulebook and the components are ambiguous. For example some cards say the attack is from "west / north", and some cards say "west north". Does that mean in the former we get to choose? Or does it mean I must pick whichever is worse? We encountered a few situations where we couldn't find a clear ruling, and we had to decide ourselves how to interpret the rules.  

Since we had a horrible first game, we decided to go again. Now that we had learnt our lesson, we did our planning better. We knew where we could expedite wall construction to skip some levels, and we knew where we should keep some basic walls for a bit longer. We delayed constructing buildings as far as we could, so that our defenses were stronger. The game is not as easy as I had originally expected, but now that we understood it, we were able to do quite well, and with ease. We have kind of solved it now, so it doesn't offer much further replayability. However I have yet to play the advanced rules, so maybe that's worth checking out. It becomes a different game because it will be competitive and not cooperative. 

Some parts of the game are interesting. This is not just a random assortment of common game mechanisms. Buildings being constructed for free, only depending on the adjacent wall type, is certainly something I haven't seen before. There is a spatial challenge in how the quadrants are positioned. Buildings in a quadrant are dependent on two walls, but these two walls are attached to two different gates. If you want to construct these two walls quickly, you need player pawns on both the gates. 

Most buildings have no function other than being worth 1 point. Only large buildings have powers. Two of the large buildings let you build a regular building for free. That's something you can plan around. 

I don't like that it is too easy for players to control the events. You can just hold off constructing buildings. There is no imminent threat. Yes, the dwindling deck is your time pressure, but being able to control when events happen is, in my opinion, too powerful. I'm saying all this from the perspective of an old timer. The game might be too easy for old gamers like me, but I'm probably not the target audience for this game. For normal people, the difficulty is more appropriate, and the game will have better replayability. Well, at least I still got two games out of it. It was still a puzzle I needed some effort to work out. I may still get more plays out of the game by trying the competitive version. Come to think of it, designing a cooperative game is actually very difficult. For experienced gamers, it needs to be pretty hard to ensure replayability. For casual gamers, you can't make it too hard because it would be disheartening. 

Tales of the Old Fort is a nice memento. The game components are atypical. The game mechanisms too. The buildings in the game are all based on real buildings in Kaohsiung and Zouying. The events are historical incidents. I'm grateful it gave me time with my children to explore its mechanisms. That's something worth celebrating. It is like having played an escape room game. You may not be keen to play again, but you've had fun. Next should be the competitive mode. 

There is a Tian Hou Temple in Kuala Lumpur (Temple of the Heavenly Goddess). There is one in Zuoying too. The one in KL was where I did my registration of marriage in 2000.