TROK

Trok is set in the universe of another game - Nidavellir. I think that's a good product and marketing strategy. This is building an intellectual property and a brand. Attract your existing fans and supporters. Nidavellir is a game about dwarfs, and Trok is the popular card game played by dwarfs in taverns in the world of Nidavellir. 

The cards in the game are numbered 1 to 7, with 1's being the most common, and 7's being the rarest. There are also some jokers in the game. Every round everyone draws five cards, and then simultaneously picks three to offer to other players. These offered cards are revealed at the same time. Whoever has the highest total value of cards being offered goes first. This player picks one card from another player. Then it is that player's turn to pick a card from someone else. This continues until everyone has taken 3 cards from other players. Then you try to make sets with the cards you now have. If you make a set of at least three cards of the same value, you score points based on the card value. E.g. a set of three 1's gives you just 1 point. Each card from the 4th onwards scores you 3 points. This is lucrative if you manage large sets. 

There is a card market of three cards. When you take a card from an opponent, instead of keeping it for yourself, you can put it into the market, and take another card from the market. If you create a set of three similar cards in the market, you score points too. 

The other type of set you can make is a set of different values. You need at least 3 different cards, and when you make such a set, you get to claim one tool from a tool market. The bigger your set, the more cards you get to choose from. The tools have various effects, for example letting you draw an extra card at the start of a round, letting you keep a card for the next round (normally you must discard all cards at the end of a round), and scoring points every round based on other tools you have. Tools are how you augment your abilities. You will want to get them early, because the earlier you get them, the more opportunities you will have to use them. 

And that's the game. I'd call this a card drafting game. Your points are secret, and you don't know exactly how well your opponents are doing. You do know each time they score, but it's not easy to keep track of everyone's cumulative score. This creates some uncertainty and excitement. The game ends when someone reaches 50 points. There is one alternative winning condition. If you can collect a set of all eight card types, i.e. 1 to 7 plus the joker, you win immediately regardless of your accumulated score. To be able to do this you will need to get several tools to augment your abilities, because by default you only draw 5 cards every round. 

In the late game when everyone has more tools, you will have more cards and you can make bigger sets, and possibly the instant win set. 

Trok is a pretty straight-forward game. It is about collecting cards and trying to make sets of the same number or sets of different numbers. Making use of tools is fun. They help you make better sets. You need to watch your opponents and try to guess what cards they might want. You want to avoid creating opportunities for them to make sets of three. The player interaction is subtle. If you want to play well, you need to pay attention. When you choose a card, you decide who goes next, and that can be an important consideration. The tools your opponents have give you clues as to what they might be trying to do. Creating good combos of tools is fun. That's the part I enjoy most. I also like that tension between choosing to grab a good tool and scoring a bunch of points. You focus more on tools in the early game, and eventually you will switch to rushing for points. That transition is not always straight-forward. Finding that balance is the interesting part of the game. 

Sabah National Tabletop Con

 

This will be held on 20-21 Jun 2026 at the Sabah Art Gallery. I missed this event last year because I had other work to do. I can make it this year and I'm looking forward to this very much. This will be my first time exhibiting at my hometown of Kota Kinabalu. If you are in KK, come play with me! 

Katana Spirits

Katana Spirits is a light strategy game from Singaporean designer Geoffrey Chia. This game uses several characters also found in other titles from Good Spirit Games. Many of Geoffrey's games have a Japanese theme. Katana Spirits is a game about training yourself as a fighter and then going out kick some gangster butt. This is a game which uses polyomino tiles. 

On your turn you must choose to train or to fight. Training means claiming a polyomino tile from the centre of the table. Fighting means spending these polyominoes to defeat gangsters and score points. Six cards are laid out at the centre of the table in a 2x3 grid. On each card there is one type of polyomino you can take. When you train, you move a shared pawn one step and claim a polyomino where it lands. How you move the pawn affects where the next player can move it to, and thus the kind of polyomino they can take. If you are able to perfectly fill your player board, you will score 1 point. You will want to try to do this, while at the same time you want to prevent your opponents from doing the same.

The gangsters are divided into three tiers - minions, lieutenants, and bosses. There are many different types of minions and only three of them are available at any one time. Whenever one gets defeated, a new one will be drawn from the deck. There are exactly three types of lieutenants and two types of bosses. These are fixed, which means you can plan precisely when and how to defeat them, and which one you want to aim for. You cannot do such planning for the minions. If there is a specific minion you want to defeat, you'd better do it before somebody else makes their move. For every lieutenant you want to fight, you must have defeated two minions. For every boss you want to fight, you must have defeated two lieutenants. The game ends when one boss is defeated or when the minion deck is exhausted.

Defeating a gangster is just spending polyominoes. The total value of the polyominoes must match or exceed the strength of the gangster you want to defeat. Ideally you want it to be a perfect match. If you overspend, it means you have overstretched yourself and you will take one injury. When the game ends, if you still have injury, you will lose points. During the game you may skip turns to heal yourself.

Health tracker

All the gangsters you defeat are worth points. They have certain properties, and some of them give you extra points based on these properties. So there is an element of set collection when you defeat gangsters. Some gangsters give you ongoing abilities, for example you can move the shared pawn an additional step, or when you heal you heal an extra step.

Katana Spirits is a light strategy game which will also work as a family game. This will work with a casual crowd as it is not complex. You don't directly fight your opponents, but there is plenty of player interaction. You affect which polyominoes your opponents can take, and you will also compete for certain minions. There are several small things you can do to annoy your opponents, especially the player after you. 

Asian Games - quick takes

I came across several games during my trip to the Philippines for the Asian Board Games Festival in Manila. I played some, and I listened to an overview for others. Here are some of these games. 

This is the Combatron game, based on the Filipino superhero which was created in the 1990's. I forgot to ask the actual game name. It is in the final stages of development. I played a near final prototype. 

This is a tactical battle game. One team is the good guys, and the other the villains. You compete to score points by controlling victory positions and also by knocking out opponents. The main victory position on the map is worth 2 points every round you control it, while two other minor ones are worth 1 point each. Whenever you knock out an opponent, you score 1 point. You play a fixed number of rounds, or you score an instant win if you reach a certain score. 

You have three characters per side, and each character is unique. Every round you take turns activating one character. Each character can be activated only once per round. When you activate a character, it may move then perform an action. Actions include various types of attacks and also some special powers. Some actions cost energy and some are free. Every character collects 1 energy at the start of its turn. It also gains 1 energy when dealing damage, and when taking damage. When to use your accumulated energy for a powerful move is an interesting decision. Do you want to save up even more for an even more powerful action? Or should you use what you have now for an opportunistic attack? 

Some attacks are melee, i.e. you need to be in the same space as your opponent. Some are ranged. I like how attacks are handled. The number of dice rolled by the attacker is determined by the attack action chosen. The number of dice rolled by the defender is determined by its inherent defense value. The attacker hits on a die roll of 3 or more, while the defender blocks on a die roll of 4 or more. This encourages attacking. One important ability some characters have is to push an opponent away from where they are standing. This is important in the contest for victory positions. 

You keep track of character health (life points) using a 20-sided die. When a character gets killed, it respawns at the starting location. Although you don't lose the character, having to start so far away in a corner does set you back significantly. 

Characters have unique abilities. If the dog dies, its teammates gain a surge of energy. Think John Wick. It makes perfect sense. In the story of the cartoon series, the dog did actually die. Sorry for spoiling it. The boss of the villains has a funny ability. He can gain extra energy for his team, but at the risk of damaging one of his minions. When I played against Chee Kong, we kept calling this guy a bad boss, for putting his people at risk for the sake of winning. He was always lucky and the die rolls went well. I said he had a cunning HR manager who always helped him get away with such practices. 

Too Many Crowns is from Underdog Games, Korea. This is a 2-player microgame. It comes in a small and very portable box. 

You fight over five territory cards which have different point values. On your side of the play area you may play at most two cards. Normally you compare the sum of your card values to see who wins a territory. However if you have a pair on your side, you will beat your opponent, even if your sum is lower. Only if your opponent also has a pair, then you compare the card value. 

You draft cards. Every round, four cards are drawn from the deck to form two sets. One player chooses one set and leaves the other to the other player. This alternates. 

The numbers go from 1 to 10, and each number occurs twice. For each number, one of the cards has a special power. For example you can swap territory cards, or swap character cards, or exchange a hand card with the deck. I think the art in this game is lovely. 

Game in play at ABGF PH

Missing Girl is from Korea too, and this has a spooky theme. I like this art style. I have not properly read the rules and I only have a vague idea of how it works. This is a deduction game. One player is the detective and through questioning needs to work out the identities of the other players. 

Normal players are dealt two cards each, and your combination of cards determines your identity. If you get two student cards, you are a student. If you get two ghost cards, you are a ghost. If you get one each, you are a possessed student. Each player is allergic to some kinds of food. The detective needs to question the other players based on these food types. 

I think that scroll is for exorcising the possessed student. 

These are for assigning points to players. In the whole game you never see the face of the student or the ghost. That makes things more spooky than otherwise. I need to ask Jon how this works. I have not tried this but I'm curious. 

Word War is from Thailand. At Asian Board Games Festival Philippines this table was probably the loudest with the most laughter. 

The card backs are cute.

The objective of the game is to get rid of all your cards. Each card lists several things. There are some keywords or phrases. There are specific actions people do at a playing table, for example refusing to answer a question, saying thank you, nodding, and sighing. There are also topics for discussion, or theme. This is a chatting game. You just chat around the table. So the topic or theme helps you get a conversation going. During the conversation, you want to get your opponents to say those keywords on your cards, or perform those actions on your cards. When they do so, you announce it immediately and show your card. You get to discard your card, while your opponent must now draw a card. When you play, you have to be careful of what you say, because your opponents are trying to lead you to say certain words. Yet you cannot just refuse to say anything. There might be actions like not responding to a direct question. No wonder there was so much laughter from this table. It is indeed exciting when you manage to get your opponent to say that exact word. 

Seek and Hide is the convention game for Asian Board Games Festival Philippines. It is an 18-card microgame. I think ABGF as a franchise is trying to have one such convention game for every time ABGF is held. I have played two other versions of this game, using the same mechanism but different themes. 

Back of the box

Here's how the game works. Your spread all 18 cards on the table, then flip over one of them. The back of the card will show five items, and these five items will appear on five separate cards among those not flipped. You race to find these five items. When you find one of them, you claim it and flip it over, so that the other players don't know which item you have found. The round ends once five cards have been claimed. Now you check whether all the five claimed cards have the correct item. You score points for correct items, and lose points in case you make a mistake. Some of the drawings are very similar so you need to be careful. 

There are always five items at the back of a card. 

Notice the three milk cartons are all slightly different. 

Malaysia Boardgame Design Competition is back!

 

MYBOGADECO is back for a 2026 edition! This year the challenge is to design a game that fits in a mint tin. Scan the QR code to sign up! 

Kinokuniya demo

 

Sunday 17 May 2026 12:00 - 18:00 I will be at Kinokuniya Bookstore at Damansara Heights Pavilion demoing Snow White and the Eleven Dwarfs and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. If you have not tried them, come visit me!

Chandigarh

It's 1951. The Indian government has just decided to build a new capital city for the Punjab region. You are one of the urban planners working on this project. This city will be called Chandigarh. As you build the city, there are opportunities to score points. When the city is completed, the highest scorer wins. 

The play area is a 4x4 grid of tiles. On each tile there are empty plots for buildings. The edges of the tiles are streets. One of your two possible actions is to move your architect pawn along the streets and then construct a building next to the junction where it stops. The other action is to take a project card and add it to your project. Taking a project card has several implications. You can have at most three project cards in your play area. When you take a new card and add it to one end of your row of cards, you will knock the card at the other end out and score it. The card being removed will show a condition and specify how many points you gain for each occurrence of this condition on the board. You want to claim cards where the conditions are met (even better if it is met several times) or can be easily met. You will be spending effort to create such conditions so that you can score more points when the card is removed. Some examples of conditions are buildings of two specific colours being right opposite each other across a street, and three tiles in a row having buildings of a specific colour. 

Your project cards affect two other things. They determine the buildings you can take from the supply. You start the game with only two buildings. You will need to take project cards to take more buildings. They decide which colours you will take. Project cards also determine the number of steps you can take on your turn. A project card shows zero, one or two footstep icons. The more of these you have in your play area, the more times you can move and place buildings. 

There are four specialists in play. These are randomised every game. There will be specialist pawns in the city. If you meet them and construct a building of the matching colour, you engage them and you will get to use their power for the rest of the game. These can be very nifty, for example letting you move your architect pawn to any spot next to a green building (park), or scoring you a point whenever you fill up a tile. The specialists themselves also give you points at game end. The different combinations of specialists every game create some variability. 

When you construct a building at the last available spot of a tile, you get to place one of your supervisors on that tile. These will score you points at game end. Every horizontal and vertical street will be evaluated to see who has the most supervisors. The perimeter will be evaluated too. The player with the highest presence in each case scores points. 

In the game I played, I prioritised engaging specialists early. This makes sense because the earlier you get them, the more opportunities you will have to use them. However I found that I didn't use them very often. What a waste. What am I doing?! It is challenging to manage several things at once. You want to create conditions that will help you score points, while at the same time you want to pay attention to how others plan to score points and avoid helping them. You need to pay attention to the available project cards and you probably don't want to create the conditions on them, because someone else might take them before you do. Your choice of project cards affects the building colours you are going to take. Sometimes the buildings you want don't come with the project cards you want. This is a challenge. Timing when to score a card is also tricky. You may need to take a project card, but you feel you are forced to score your other project card at a less-than-ideal moment. Dilemmas! While considering all these factors, you also need to compete to place supervisors. 

Chandigarh is a game about recognising and building patterns. I find it tactical. Project cards available are your opportunities. You want to spot good opportunities to score points. Creating patterns takes some effort. You want to make use of buildings already placed on the board. You need to take the right buildings into your hand before you can place them. The scoring conditions are quite specific, and it is not easy to score many points. The supervisors are your long-term strategy. If you do well, they give you a boost at game end. In the game I played, I completely neglected them. I was too busy scoring points from the project cards. In hindsight, that was probably not a good idea. I found that I tended to score often, but each individual card didn't score much. That seemed to work okay for me, but I think it is also viable to prioritise quality over quantity. You can pick a card which scores more points, or you try to fulfil the condition multiple times before you score it. I feel it is important to watch your opponents' project cards. You don't want to help them fulfil their conditions. In fact, you probably should try to block them by placing buildings where they need to place theirs. 

If you are looking for a mid-weight strategy game with a spatial aspect to it, check out Chandigarh. It offers a few fun twists and presents an interesting challenge. 

interviewed: Monkey Plays (Philippines)

 

I was interviewed by Dan of Monkey Plays at the Asian Board Games Festival in Manila. The full video (mostly English, some Tagalog) was her experience at the fair, and other designers were interviewed too. The video also shows Pinocchio being played. 

Link: https://youtu.be/WJ1WzEpplpw?si=VShCuwwhvFwZk8VH&t=667 

Talon

Talon is a game of tactical spaceship battles. It is a game for two players. One plays Earth and the other plays an invading alien civilisation. You each control a fleet of spaceships. Your goal is to destroy all of your opponent’s spaceships. 

The battlefield is abstracted to a 2D hexagonal map. You fly your spaceships around and shoot at your opponent’s spaceships. There are different classes of spaceships and they have different abilities. The spaceships of the two factions are also a little different. There are differences in fire power, shields and manoeuvrability. Yes, these spaceships have shields. There are shields on all four sides, and you need to completely destroy a shield before you can hit the spaceship itself. If your shield is depleted, you can recharge it somewhat.

Guns have different facings and you can only shoot in specific directions. They also have different ranges. Naturally, the closer you are to an enemy, the more lethal your hit will be. One thing you can do in the game is to adjust the power core of your spaceship. This affects the manoeuvrability and also other characteristics of the ship.

One round of play is divided into many small steps. Each of these steps specify which spaceship classes may act. Spaceship classes go from 1 to 6. This is one of the ways how the game handles the different abilities of different ship classes. 

When playing the game, I feel like I am playing a game of warships during the age of sail. I don’t mean it in a negative way. I think it is partly because the map is 2D. You have to manoeuvre your ship well and position yourself to shoot at the best possible moment. Every time you shoot, you need to recharge your weapons before you can shoot again. So this is not a game where you just keep pressing the fire button. You need to be smart about when the best moment to shoot is. This is not a fast and furious type of game. You have to be deliberate and careful. 

So far I have only played one introductory level game where the two sides only have two ships each. I have not yet experienced the complexity of larger scale battles. I find the game serious and strategic. It reminds me of Star Wars X-Wing, not because of how similar they are, but because of how different they are. Similar setting, but very different gameplay experience. Star Wars X-Wing is the kind of game where you go pew pew pew. Talon feels more like a serious war game. 

Lightning Train

Lightning Train was described as Ticket To Ride with deck-building, but I think that will paint an inaccurate picture. It is indeed played on a map of USA, and you do compete to build tracks between cities. The core mechanism is indeed bag-building (a form of deck-building). However I find this a much more complex game. It's a mid- to heavy-weight game. 

This is the game map. In this game you will be laying train tracks, building train stations, and delivering goods. One important project which everyone is working on is completing the transcontinental railroad connecting New York and San Francisco. The game ends when this is achieved, or at the end of 12 rounds. Several things that you do score points. When the game ends whoever has the highest score wins. 

This is the player board. The two red backed cards on the right are secret objectives. If you complete them, you will score points. Some of them are like Ticket To Ride. If you can connect specific cities, you score points. There are other types of objectives too. Your player board has various slots for placing train carriages. Whenever you fill a section, you get to use the action or benefit specified. The two sections at the bottom are upgrades. When you upgrade, you gain permanent abilities. 

These tiles here are the bag-building mechanism of the game. You have your own bag of tiles, and every turn you draw five to place in this section of your player board. There are five regular spots, and once you fill them all (like in this photo above) you stop drawing tiles from your bag. These tiles you have drawn allow you to perform actions. Money lets you buy new tiles. These new tiles go into your bag the next time it is exhausted. The train carriage with a lightning icon means you immediately take a carriage. You can see I have taken two. These carriages can be placed in sections of your player board to do various things. If you don't have enough, you can keep some here for actions in future turns. Carriages can also be used to lay tracks on the main game board. The goods icon let you deliver goods. The non-white tiles are contracts. You need contracts of specific regions to be able to lay tracks or build stations in them. 

Notice that two spaces on the left have a plus sign. Some tiles have a plus sign, and they can be placed in these special spaces. That means you may be able to draw more than five tiles on your turn. You can upgrade your player board to get two more plus sign slots. In the best case you can draw and use nine tiles. 

The round tokens are goods. There are several types. During game setup, some are already placed on the map. Every round, some are added. Stations that are build have one or two demand icons. You can deliver the goods they need to them. Once the demand is satisfied, the station no longer wants this good type. When delivering goods, every stretch of train tracks used scores one point for their owners. The owner of the station scores a point too. This is one way you score points in the game. 

You will start on the eastern seaboard. There are five cities here which allow you to start building tracks. Also initially you only have contracts for the three regions in the east. To build beyond that, you will need to buy new tiles which are contracts for other regions. 

I did a four-player game, and our progress felt slow. We didn't seem to be racing towards San Francisco. Maybe it was because we were all new to the game, and we needed time to digest how the game worked. This is certainly more complex than Ticket To Ride, so I feel like I need to do a lot of work to build just one stretch. Laying tracks and building stations are restrictive. You need to have drawn the right tiles with the right contracts. You need to have enough trains drawn that turn. You can only save one train from the previous turn to use for laying tracks. You cannot lay tracks anywhere you want. They must extend from your existing tracks or from a station you own. 

We did eventually manage to connect to San Francisco. That triggered a one-time bonus scoring. In our case since it was a four-player game, the game did not end yet. We needed to connect to both Houston and Seattle to trigger game end. We did not manage to finish our game because it was late and one of us had to leave. We didn't have any obvious leading player at that point. Our scores were close. 

Lightning Train is not that complex once you understand it. I had fun buying tiles and seeing how they helped me on future turns. The tile market works like Ascension. There are always six tiles available, and whenever one is bought, the market is refilled with a random new one. I'd call this a deck-building game with board play instead of a boardgame with deck-building. The deck-building part drives what you can do. You must buy smartly and coherently in order to be able to execute the strategy you have in mind. There is tactical competition in claiming routes and delivering goods. You need to fight for these. One fun element in the game is how you keep improving your abilities. Buying better tiles let you do more within the same turn. You get to upgrade your player board too. You unlock some abilities when you build stations and when you surpass certain victory point thresholds. There is a satisfying feeling of acceleration. 

I has been a while since I joined a BoardGameCafe.net Friday night session. I used to be a regular, showing up almost every Friday. That was up till before the pandemic. After those few years of on-and-off lockdown, I got busy with other things and now don't game as much as before. It's nice to be back learning a new game in person and playing with others across a physical table.