Spots

Who else has watched the Disney cartoon 101 Dalmatians as a kid? Spots is a light dice game about dalmatians! Well, maybe not specifically dalmatians. Just dogs with spots. Many of the dogs in this game don't actually look like dalmatians. This is a game with a bit of push-your-luck, in which you race to fill six dog cards with dice of the right number of pips. 

You start with two dog cards. Each dog card has 2 to 4 spaces for dice, and they are in red. In each space you can only place a die of the specific value shown. A dog is not done when you fill all the spaces. There is one more step you need to do. You must perform an action to flip the dog card to the blue side. When a dog is still on the grey side, you may lose the dice on it, i.e. your progress can be completely undone. 

At the start of a game you will set up six action cards. The box comes with more than six action cards and you can play with different combinations. Players take turns using an action card. An action card that is used becomes temporarily unavailable. Only when five cards have been used will they all be reset and become available again. 

Every player has a backyard. Your backyard is where you get to bury dice you can't place onto your dogs. As a general rule, when you roll dice, you must place them. If you can't place them on your dogs, you will be forced to bury them in your backyard. There is a limit. Your backyard cannot have dice totalling more than 7. If that happens, you go bust and lose all dice on grey-side dogs and your backyard. This is the push-your-luck aspect of the game. The higher your backyard dice total is, the higher your risk when you roll dice. The different action cards in the game let you do different things. Some let you roll more dice than others. Rolling more dice usually entails a higher risk, even though it can help you progress more quickly. 

One action card lets you roll two dice, and then you have the option of rolling one more. One action card lets you roll three dice, and then you can keep rolling one die at a time as many more times as you wish. One action card lets you roll dice in your backyard. There is one action which lets you draw an additional dog card. 

In this screenshot above, three of my grey dogs (upper half of the screenshot) are filled, but I still need to take an action to flip them to the blue side to secure them. If I fill my sixth and last dog, I will win immediately. Flipping dogs to the blue side is not necessary for winning. It's just protection against losing progress. At this point I need exactly one die showing 4. If I go bust at this point, I will reset all four of my grey dogs. 

The red bone is a treat. Treats are a type of resource you can earn, and you spend them to reroll dice. In Spots when you reroll you must reroll all dice. You can't lock some then reroll the others. It's all or nothing. 

The game comes with many action cards, and there are many combinations you can play with. There are some suggested combinations in the rulebook. This variety provides some replayability. 

Rolling dice is exciting. There is certainly luck in this game, but there are also ways to mitigate that. You can be strategic about how you play. Making sure you have some treats ready helps. You need to balance between going fast and taking risks. I had fun with the game even when playing in async mode. I think the game will be even more fun when playing a physical copy in person. You will feel the excitement on your opponents' turns too. This is a nice light game to play with non-gamers who are dog lovers. It is a relaxing filler for gamers. 

BGG Top 100

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to look at the current Top 100 games on www.BoardGameGeek.com and see how well I'm doing in playing them all. I realise I have never done this before in 19 years of blogging about boardgames. Certainly the Top 100 looks very different from 19 years ago. No more Tigris & Euphrates today. I don't actually browse the Top 100 list often now. However it was important to me when I first got into the hobby. I was curious about all these games which were ranked so high by players from all over the world. I remember being appalled that Axis & Allies wasn't on the list. It wasn't even in the Top 200. I had thought it was the pinnacle of boardgames. 

We should not simply take the BGG Top 100 as the best 100 boardgames in the world. It is an aggregation of what many boardgamers think. It is the product of how people use BGG, and it reflects specifically the tastes of people who bother to rate games on BGG. That means hobby gamers. When looking at the list, we should understand the context. Although it is not perfect, it is still a highly useful list for people who like this kind of games and want to explore other similar games.  

BGG Top 10 in Feb 2026

I have played 56 out of the top 100. Considering that several games have their revised editions and 2nd editions also in the top 100 as a separate entry (Agricola, Mansion of Madness, Great Western Trail, Eclipse, War of the Ring), I'd consider myself as having played 61. That's higher than I expected. I thought I was further behind. There are some games which have spin-offs and reimplementations. I probably can consider myself as having tried them. These are not clear cut though. Maybe they are different enough from the originals to be considered separate games. For example Endeavor Deep Sea, Great Western Trail: New Zealand, Gaia Project, Age of Innovation (can these two be considered Terra Mystica variants?), and The Crew: Mission Deep Sea. Maybe Wingspan Asia can be considered just an expansion. I have played Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, but not Gloomhaven or Frosthaven. I have more or less seen the system, and I am not particularly interested to try the other games in the family. Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth is based on 7 Wonders: Duel. I'm interested to try it if I have the opportunity, even though I have played 7 Wonders: Duel. 

One thing I notice about the top 100 is this is like Hollywood. So many games are spin-offs, variants and newer editions (remakes). How many Marvel movies can you watch before tiring of them? I wonder whether this should be interpreted as a sign of boardgame companies growing too big and losing the appetite for creative risks. Spin-offs and expansions are financially prudent. It's just that they are not so exciting for me. Or maybe we should see this in a more positive light. Publishers are making what their fans want. Perhaps this is mostly natural demand and supply. 

Here are some notable games I still have not played and I am somewhat interested in. I'm curious about Dune: Imperium and Dune: Imperium - Uprising. Two games in the top 10! Star Wars: Rebellion is also a top 10 game and it has been around for a while. Two others I'm interested in are Slay the Spire and Grand Austria Hotel. I can't say I'm keen enough to want to buy a copy so that I can play them. I find that I rarely buy heavy Eurogames now, or any heavy game. 

There are three games from the Clank! family in the top 100 and I have not played any of them. Cascadia is a popular game which I have not tried. There's also SETI, Kanban, Everdell. I have never played the classic Twilight Imperium. It's not a genre I'm keen about now. Crokinole has been in the top 100 for many years, and I have never come across a physical copy of the game. I guess it's not a thing in Malaysia. 

My 10's among the top 100 are Pandemic Legacy Season 1, Through the Ages, and Race for the Galaxy. My 9's are Agricola, Power Grid, Le Havre, Maracaibo, and Darwin's Journey. For any game in the top 100 which I rate a 7 or below, I'll have plenty of people who disagree. These are the games which didn't work so well for me. My 6's are Anachrony, Great Western Trail, The White Castle, and The Gallerist. I have only one 5 in the top 100 - Harmonies. 

Which are your favourite games in the top 100? Is your all-time favourite in the top 100? Mine is Innovation, and it is currently ranked 300+ on BGG. Which is your lowest rated game in the top 100? 

Dionysia

Dionysia is a microgame from Buttonshy Games. So you know what to expect. A game with exactly 18 cards which comes in a wallet that fits comfortably in your shirt pocket. 

Dionysia is a two player game in which you draft cards to make a play. Cards represent scenes. Your play has three acts, and each act must have three scenes. You take turns drafting a card from a market of three face up cards. The moment you take a card, you must decide which act to add it to. When you take the second card for an act, you must stack it above or below the first card, slightly offset so that the icons of every card are visible. This below is what your work-in-progress looks like. For the first two acts where I still had only one card, I didn't need to decide where to position them yet. I placed them this way because I wanted to remind myself this was one potential configuration I wanted to use.  

The top section of a card shows an ability and a scoring criteria. The bottom section shows two icons. When you complete your play, the icons will form a 6x3 grid. The scoring criteria of a card indicates a sequence of icons you need to have in your grid in order to score points. This sequence can go from left to right, or top to bottom. If the sequence occurs multiple times, you score every occurrence. 

The abilities of the cards let you do various things, like rearranging your cards. Often they also help you score points. Of the three cards you have in one act (i.e. one column), only the ability and the scoring criteria of the top card will take effect, because those of the other cards are covered up. When you add cards to your play, you have to decide which card to use as your top card, and which abilities and scoring criteria you have to forgo. Where you position your card affects how the icons appear on your grid eventually, which you must also consider because of the scoring criteria. 

This is what a completed play looks like. If you look at the three scoring criteria, you can see that sword-skull-skull appears twice, cup-skull-skull appears once, and skull-cup-skull appears twice. 

Dionysia is a game of drafting and tableau building. There are difficult choices to make when you build your own play. You need to choose the scoring criteria to use and the card abilities to use, while at the same time you need to build your grid of icons to match the criteria you have selected. You need to consider multiple requirements at the same time. And then there's also your opponent to worry about. Sometimes you may want to take a card for the sake of denying him. 

boardgaming in photos: Race for the Galaxy, El Grande, Nippon

I have been playing some Race for the Galaxy (just the base game) on BGA with Jon and Yasmin. This is the game I have the highest play count for, at 2200+ games. Most of these were played against bots on the iPad. However I did play many 2-player games with my wife Michelle, many years ago. It's nice to be playing a stretch with humans again. I find that I am more careful and deliberate compared to when I play with bots. This gives me a better appreciation of the game. It is a strange feeling playing with just the base game, now that I am so used to playing the first story arc with all three expansions. 

The user interface design in BGA is not as good as the iPad, but it is serviceable. 

Nippon is about the modernisation and industrialisation of Japan. A heavy Eurogame where money is tight and you have multiple things to worry about. As you play, you adjust how each aspect of your business conglomerate scores. You will want to do more of the stuff that will score more points for you. It's not easy to need to commit early which aspects to focus on. 

The good old El Grande! Published in 1995, this is one of the most popular Eurogames of its era. Unfortunately it has never been quite my thing. Normally I wouldn't suggest it, and I'll only play if others want to. With this recent play, it was a bit more chaotic than I remembered. I also find it quite tactical. There will be big opportunities popping up unexpectedly, and you will want to grab them. I once chose a card which forced everyone else to send all their cubes back to the provinces. Everyone must have hated me then. 

Viticulture - the wine-making game. A worker placement game where some spots are available only during summer, and some only during winter. 

This was still early game. I had planted vines, but not yet started harvesting or making wine. 

The Fox in the Forest: Duet

This spin-off of The Fox in the Forest changes things up a bit, turning a competitive game into a cooperative one. This is a trick-taking game for two players. You have a pawn moving along a track. There are markers placed next to the track. As you move that pawn back and forth along the track, it removes a marker whenever it stops, if there is one next to it. Your goal is to remove all markers from the track within three rounds of play. You have to be careful not to move off the two extremes of the track. Do that too many times, and you will lose. 

Cards come in 3 suits. At the start of the game, a card is randomly drawn to become the decree, and the suit of the decree is the trump suit. Cards have movement values, ranging from 0 to 3. Odd numbered cards have special powers. The winner of a trick moves the pawn in his direction, and the number of steps to move it is the sum of the movement values of both the cards played. Standard trick-taking rules apply. You must follow suit if possible. You can't discuss your cards with your partner. Some cards are not dealt. You don't know exactly which cards he has. The game is about trying to maximise every move so that you are always removing a marker from the track. At the same time you don't want to fall off the track. That generally means you don't want one person to win too many tricks in a row. 

A big part of the game is making use of the special abilities of the cards. The 9 lets your opponent play a card of any suit. This flexibility can be very helpful. The 1 lets the winner move the pawn in either direction. When a 7 is played, you must exchange a card with your opponent. There is also a card that lets you change the trump suit. 

A round ends when you play all your cards. You will shuffle and deal a new hand for the new round. Some markers will be added to the track. The track will also shrink. 

The Fox in the Forest: Duet can be played very strategically. You can keep track of what have been played. You can calculate what cards your partner might have (you can't discuss your cards). There are many effective ways you can use the card powers. Compared to the original, I prefer the competitive original and find it more exciting. Certainly the cooperative version offers a very different experience. If you are in the mood for something less confrontational and more like collaborative problem solving, give it a go. 

Malaysia Boardgame Show 2026 - 18 & 19 Apr 2026

The Malaysia Boardgame Show is happening 18-19 April 2026 in Kuala Lumpur! Cili Padi Games and I will be there. Come play with me! 

More information on Instagram and Linktree. There is an open-to-public area and a ticketed area for activities. Tickets for the latter here. Don't miss the early bird prices! 

Agent Avenue

Agent Avenue is a two player game with bluffing and psychological play. You are spies hiding in an innocent neighbourhood. You need to find and catch your opponent before they catch you. Well, that is how the story goes. In terms of practical implementation, you and your opponent race around a circular track, starting opposite from each other. Your goal is to run fast enough to catch your opponent. Movement is determined using a card drafting mechanism. You will collect cards during play. There are two other ways the game ends. You win instantly if you collect your third Codebreaker card. You lose instantly if you collect your third Daredevil card.

You have a hand of four cards. On your turn, you play two of them to the centre of the table, one face up and the other face down. Your opponent must then pick one card to add to their set. You take the other to add to your set. When you add a card to your set, you move a number of steps on the board as dictated by the card. If you already have other copies of the same card in your set, the movement rule will change, depending on the card. And that’s all there is to the game! Pretty simple.

Most cards in the game are good, helping you advance. However, there are some cards which force you to move backwards. Although you are the one who picks the two cards to be used on the current turn, it is your opponent who decides who gets which card. The key is making use of that face down card. When the face up card is a good card, are you hiding an even better card? Or if that face up card is bad, are you hiding an even worse card? The player who has to choose is put in a dilemma. This is where the psychological play comes in. 

The numbers on the cards mean the number of steps you move when you have one, two, or three or more cards. You first Double Agent forces you to move backwards one step, but your second lets you move forward 6 steps. 

An optional module introduces special tools when you land on the corners. 

As you collect more and more cards, the tactics change. Which cards you already have affect the power of the next card you get. Deciding which cards you want to collect and which cards you want to force or trick your opponent into taking is long-term strategy. If your opponent has two Daredevils, he will be reluctant to take any face down card. The same principle applies when you already have two Codebreakers. He wouldn't want to risk you taking the face down card. In specific situations, it is possible to make a play which lets you catch your opponent regardless of his choice. This is because cards behave differently depending on your existing set. 

I was green and I was only 2 steps away from catching Han. I would offer Enforcer and Double Agent. Han didn't have any Double Agent, and his first one would make him move backwards. If he took that and I took Enforcer, I would catch him. I had one Double Agent. If he took the Enforcer, he would move forward, but my second Double Agent would let me advance 6 steps, and I would catch him. 

Agent Avenue is a simple and clever two player game. I like that it is clean and concise. Minimal fluff. One nice touch is the art work for the same character varies. Most characters have six cards, and the art for each card is different. Check out the Codebreaker and the Daredevil cards below. 

Irish Gauge

Irish Gauge is a game about developing the train network in Ireland. It is an open information game. It is an investment game, and almost but not really a stock-control game. Players invest in railroad companies and hope to make money as the companies they are invested in do well. You don't own companies. You only own shares in them. It sounds a little like 18XX games, but this is much simpler and abstracted. It reminds me a little of Chicago Express / Wabash Cannonball. 

Five companies are in play, and as part of game setup, the first share of each company is auctioned off to the players. During the game, more shares may be auctioned off. Holding shares of a company means that whenever that company makes money, you'll get some. The earnings are divided among the shareholders based on their holdings. 

One of the things you may do on your turn is to build railroads. You can only do this for a company you are invested in. You place train markers on the board to represent your company's railroad network. You get to spend 3 action points for building railroads. The action points needed to build in a hex depends on the terrain type, whether it is urban, and whether others have built there. You want to connect your companies to towns and cities, because these help them make money. Towns are upgraded to become cities when you place a cube in them. You get to choose the cube colour when you do this. 

There are cubes in three different colours. They represent different goods. You already have 8 cities on the board at the start of the game. Cubes are all placed in a bag. They are drawn from the bag when you want to trigger dividends. The game ends when the bag runs out of cubes. 

When you want to trigger dividends, you blind draw three cubes from the bag. The cube colours determine which companies issue dividends. If a company is connected to at least a city with one of the colours and a town, it will make money, which means the shareholders will make money. So this is a game about setting up your companies to be able to make money, hopefully from all three colours, and then you want to trigger dividends to make lots of money. Auctioning a share means an additional player may get into the company and share its profits. This is normally an act of aggression, when you want to get inside a company to get a share of its profits. If there is only one current shareholder, they are not going to make any more money by buying this new share. They are only preventing others from also making money from this company in future. For other players who want to get it, it is about evaluating whether the money you spend to bid on the share is justifiable. Are you going to make back that money? 

Irish Gauge is a pretty straight-forward game. The actions are simple. However the strategies are not simplistic. In the game we played, there were four of us, and at the start of the game, I was the only player who controlled two companies. In hindsight, that might not have been a good idea. I couldn't grow two companies equally well. 

The game is a tight fight. This is a perfect information game. You can think many steps ahead. You know exactly how your opponents can respond to your move, if they choose to do so. In this sense the game is almost chess-like. The only uncertainty is when dividends are being issued. You don't know which colours will come out. The ultimate winner is the richest player. Issuing dividends is not about you making money, it is about you making more money than others. If your companies are positioned well to make money, you are in no hurry to take the dividend action, because when others do it, it will likely benefit you too, and hopefully more than them. 

Irish Gauge is the kind of game for smart and strategic people. It's serious and skill-driven. I also find it a little dry, maybe because of  how serious it feels to me. There is a little variability in the game setup, but the map will stay the same every time you play. Only the cube colours of the starting cities will differ. 

Malaysian Holidays: Chinese New Year

 

This is a card from my upcoming game Malaysian Holidays. It will be published by Specky Studio.  The art work, which I absolutely adore, is from Sunny Day. Here's wishing everyone a wonderful Year of the Horse ahead! Stay tuned for news for Malaysian Holidays.

Amalfi: Renaissance

Amalfi: Renaissance is a game about the age of sail. You manage a fleet of ships which helps you obtain all sorts of goods from distant lands. With these goods you can recruit characters which give you various abilities. You can secure private contracts, which give you exclusive rights to some trade destinations. You can buy great works of art. They have various benefits. They tend to be expensive, but they are often worth many points. You can and should expand your infrastructure. Build more ships to help you do more. Build lighthouses at popular trade destinations so that when others visit, you get a small benefit. The game is played over four rounds, after which the highest scorer wins. 

The main game board

The player board

The most important mechanism in the game is how you use your fleet to gain resources. You only have a limited number of ships you can use every round. They start at sea, which means they are available for use. To make a trade journey, usually you spend one ship to send several others to a destination producing a specific resource. At your player board, you shift these ships from the sea to the section representing the specific resource type. Now each ship represents 2 or 3 of that resource, which you can spend to buy other things. When you spend resources, those ships are shifted back to the sea, becoming available again. You can choose to shift them back even when you don’t need to use their resource type. However when you do this the resource they represent will be converted to a basic resource - food. 

Some things can be bought using food. More importantly, food is needed when you want to launch a trade expedition. Depending on how many ships you own, at the end of a round you must have enough food to pay for maintenance. Failing to do so leads to a harsh penalty. 

You score points in many ways. Things you buy give you points - private contracts, works of art, and some characters too. At the end of every round there is a scoring condition evaluated. There are also three goal cards you can work towards. The earlier you achieve a goal compared to others, the bigger the reward. 

A character

Various trade destinations you can visit.

Works of art

Private contracts are a special type of trade destination

Goals are randomly drawn during setup

Special scoring at the end of each round

Amalfi is a heavy Eurogame in which you try to generate resources efficiently and spend them well to expand your infrastructure and buy stuff which help you score points. Managing your resources is challenging. You need to make sure you have decent cash flow, i.e. food. If you get a good combination of characters, their abilities can help you greatly. There are many different criteria for round end scoring and there are many goals. These create variability. 

I did not find the game interesting. For me it is just another complex resource management game. It is challenging enough. There are many ways to score points. One difficulty I have with games with many ways of scoring points is they feel like yet another Excel exercise. I'm just figuring out efficient ways to produce goods and turn them to points. I feel like I have been doing this same thing in too many other games. I am not experiencing anything new. One thing nice about the game is the characters. They are based on historical characters and it is satisfying to be able to put together a team which synergises well. 

This was my player board at game end. I had 7 characters. 

Han had 9 private contracts! And he had built all his ships and lighthouses. He won by a mile.