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.

Happy Lunar New Year!

 

7 Wonders Dice

7 Wonders, first published in 2010, has now become a juggernaut of a franchise. The series has multiple expansions and spin offs. Some of the spin offs have different core mechanisms. They are different games, but they use the same theme and art style. The 2 player version of 7 Wonders has now been turned into a Lord of the Rings game. For the dice game version to get released only in 2025, 15 years after the original, is a little surprising. For many other successful franchises, the dice game version or the card game version would have been out much earlier. 

7 Wonders Dice is a roll-and-write game. Multiple dice are rolled every round, and you pick one to use. Everyone does this at the same time. Your choice does not affect other players. The same die can be used by multiple players. You normally use a die to tick one box on your player sheet, which represents constructing one section of a building. The game ends after any one player completes three buildings. The player sheets are the same, with two exceptions, your wonder of the world, and your university. Your wonder is in the top left corner, and it can be completed in only three steps. It is actually pretty easy to complete. You are not relying very much on other buildings to help you complete your wonder. Instead, it is your wonder which will help you complete other buildings or gain specific benefits. 

You roll the dice in a flat and wide box with a cover on, and you shake that box in a circular motion. This is because the box is divided into four sections, and depending on where a die is, the cost to use the die differs. The cost can be between 0 to 3 gold. If you can't afford any die, or if you are not willing to spend the money on what you can afford, you can choose to not use any die and collect 3 gold instead. 

The green building is the university. All the spaces on your sheet has a number below it. This number means how many resource types your nation needs to produce for you to be able to tick the space. If your nation does not produce enough, you can make up for the shortage by paying gold. This is why you need gold. At this particular university, the first spaces of the three rows mean (from top to bottom) the blue die becomes free for you, you earn 2 gold whenever you use the red die, and you get to tick your yellow building. Every player's university is different, and this nudges players in different directions. When you reach the third spaces at the three rows, they unlock an additional die - black, purple or white. The black die has faces for multiple buildings, so it gives you more flexibility. The purple and white dice are for two specific advanced buildings. 

You have two red buildings - garrisons - on the two sides of your sheet. You tick boxes representing offence and defence. Your garrisons are compared against those of your neighbours. If you tick offence boxes before your neighbours have any defences, you score more points. So here you have some player interaction. There isn't a lot in this game. You don't steal points from your opponents. It's just that they will be letting you score more if they don't put up defences. 

I played on BGA, and the convenience of doing so is a problem. It's not the website's fault. It's mine. Every turn the system highlights all the valid spots I can tick and indicates the cost. As a result I don't think much and just click. This is not a good thing. In the first game I played, I decided to be thrifty. I mostly chose to use dice which were free. Sometimes I chose to increase resource production even when it wasn't free, because having more resource types would help reduce costs in future. I later realised that this wasn't a good policy. I was reactive and I didn't really have a clear strategy. I wasn't building up any strong advantage. 

Those coin icons along the bottom of the player sheet are for recording your gold. When you earn gold, you circle coins. When you spend gold, you fill in the circles. A game starts with 7 coins circled, which means you start with 7 gold. If you look at the screenshot above (I'm at the top), I rarely earn or spend gold, much less than all my opponents. 

Being insistent on saving money greatly constrained me. I had little consistency when constructing buildings. I had no coherent strategy. Well, other than being thrifty, which I later realised was not a good strategy. I should have been more deliberate in planning which buildings and which strengths to leverage. I needed to focus on specific areas. Only with focus you can gain a stronger advantage. 

In my second game, I chose to focus first on completing my wonder. My wonder helped me with resource production, and when I completed my wonder (which was also considered a building), I gained the bonus for a completed building. I realise that there is a sense of urgency in this game. You really should not waste any turn. You want to watch your opponents' progress so that you don't get caught unprepared when the game ends. Or look at it this way, if you are quicker in completing buildings, you have the advantage of being able to end the game when the time best fits you. That's a powerful thing. The decision you make every turn looks simple, but you actually need to put some thought into it if you want to play well and play more strategically. 

Player interaction is low in 7 Wonders Dice. It almost feels like a solo game. Among roll-and-write games, it's about mid-weight. Although the player sheets do differ, so far it doesn't seem to make a huge difference. Maybe I have not grasped this aspect well yet. For me the game is decent but not spectacular. However there is something instinctive that I enjoy about it which I can't fully explain. I think I enjoy the options I am given, and I enjoy the sense of progress. 

Take A Number / X Nimmt

Take A Number is an advanced version of the classic game from Wolfgang Kramer, Take 5, also known as 6 Nimmt and Category 5. My copy is a gift from Allen, and it is a 2-in-1 version containing Take 5 too. It is recommended that you play Take 5 before Take A Number, which makes sense, because the game mechanism in Take 5 is a subset of Take A Number. 

Many people already know Take 5, but for the benefit of those who don’t, allow me to briefly explain this part of Take A Number which is just like Take 5. In Take A Number, cards are numbered 1 to 100, and every card has between one to seven bull icons. Bull icons are bad. They are penalty points, and you want to avoid getting them. You start a round with 8 cards. Everyone simultaneously plays a card, and then in order from small to large, they add their card to one of three card rows at the centre. Rows are always in ascending order. You must place your card next to a smaller number and it must be the nearest to your number if you have more than one option. Rows have limits and if your newly placed card exceeds that limit, you will be forced to take all cards in the row, and use your card to start a new row. 

In Take 5, cards you take this way go to your personal penalty pile. In Take A Number, not so fast. Of the cards you are forced to take, you must first add one to a personal card row before you. This row must be in ascending order. If you are going to violate this rule, all the cards in your personal row go to your personal penalty pile, and the new card starts a new row. You will be penalised for cards in your penalty pile, but not for cards still in your personal card row. That’s something you want to manage well. 

A round is played until one player runs out of cards. Since it is possible to take cards into your hand, the length of a round can vary depending on how the players are taking cards back. When a round ends, if you still have cards in hand, you will be penalised for these cards. You are only protected from cards in your personal card row. 

The game is only played two rounds. After that the player with the fewest penalty points wins.

The core mechanism from Take 5 is still there. Now you have a personal card row to manage as well. The most important strategic difference is the fact that you can card count. You know exactly what cards your opponents have taken into their hands. This is something you can plan around. You also know they know what you have. The game becomes more thinky. It is more strategic. 

I prefer the simplicity of Take 5. It’s a light game in which you can somewhat strategise, but you know sometimes luck beats strategy. That’s perfectly fine. I also like that it can be played with up to 10 players. Take A Number is max 4 players. If you are looking for something more strategic and more advanced, give it a go. It is a deeper game and offers a different experience. 

boardgaming in photos: playtesting at Apollo

7 Feb 2026. We had a playtesting session at Nasi Kandar Apollo on a Saturday afternoon. I didn't manage to take photos of every game played, not even every game that I played. I did a rough playtest of one idea I came up with just the day before. I wanted to make a simple card game that can be played on a road trip, needing no table. Everyone has a stack of 5 cards. They are ordered. The highest number cycles back to the smallest. Your deck represents a circle of rooms you will be moving through. Your topmost card is the room you are in. To move to an adjacent room, you either move your top card to the bottom, or you move your bottom card to the top. That means you will move to the next smaller or higher number. I get this idea from Revolver Noir. Every round everybody moves once, and then the active player announces a number. Then everybody shows their room. If you are in a room of that number, the active player takes your card and scores a point for it. You draw a card and insert it at the right place. It's very simple. The memory element is pretty heavy though. I'm not sure yet whether I will continue to work on this. I playtested this using just a normal deck of poker cards. 

This is Jon's money laundering game. The idea is we all run illegal businesses, and we have to launder our dirty money in order to fully use it. Money is victory points. There will be police raids and if you don't clean your money in time, you may lose your hard earned money. It's dirty money, but still, it's hard earned. 

Qing Ye lost lots of illicit goods several times, due to the unfortunate (for him) timing of the police raids. In this game you have to set up legitimate businesses in order to launder money. Not necessarily laundry shops. Restaurants work too. 

Faris brought one very pretty and complex-looking game, but I did not get to try it. All of us Malaysian designers are pinning our hopes on him to make it big in Eurogames internationally. He designed Philharmonix. 

This is Chee Kong's Slow Life Academy. There are four tracks where you get to advance your markers, and only the players with the highest and second highest markers will score points. There is a value marker you need to advance too, and it determines how many points the leaders score. You have cards numbered from 0 to 3, and you play them simultaneously. Only the highest card gets to advance. If you win with the powerful 3, you only advance one step. However if you win with the lowly 1, you get to advance four steps. If you win with a 2, you advance two steps. I find this quite clever. When you play a 0, you won't win, but you will advance the value marker. This can present a dilemma. If you give up on a track and don't want to waste any of your higher cards, the 0 you play will help the winner score more points. 

Another fun twist is the tracks wrap around. If the value marker or any of the player markers exceed 8, they go back to 1. If you do too well, you may accidentally end up losing. If the value marker gets pushed too far, it resets to a low value. I find this game promising and I'm looking forward to it. 

Jon has complained to me several times that he's not good at designing simple dumb games for the mass market. No it's not the type of games that seasoned gamers like us enjoy, but I told him he could do it. And he did. This is his haunted house game. It's a simple push-your-luck game. You flip over cards one by one and you try not to exceed 10 hearts. If you do, you gain nothing on your turn. You can stop drawing cards any time to take whatever you have so far. When the game ends, the player with the most cards wins. The player holding the fiery skull cannot win. If you go bust, you'll take the fiery skull. Some cards when drawn make the player with the fiery skull lose a card, after which if anyone else has the most cards, the fiery skull is passed to him. The game is very simple and I think this will work well for the casual crowd. I must say I enjoy it too. 

This is Qing Ye's Georgetown, about the various historical figures and organisations in Georgetown, Penang. You buy and sell goods, and manipulate the prices to your advantage. You build a tableau which helps you score points. It's a light strategy game with fun combos. 

With Chinese New Year (Lunar New Year) coming up, some of us met up for a lousang. Lousang is a Malaysian / Singaporean Chinese thing. It's a ritual where we wish for good fortune for the coming year. 

I playtested Pilgrim Poker with some of my BNI friends. They are trainers and coaches like me, and I did a sharing session about how I develop and playtest games. They found it fascinating. It was a good opportunity for me to playtest my game with people new to it. 

Jetta is a trainer friend from Hong Kong. I visited him in Hong Kong late last year, and I didn't expect we would meet again so soon, this time in Malaysia. He had a training job here. 

Jetta likes real-time games. I showed him Escape: The Curse of the Temple. We only did the basic game for our very first game, and we lost rather horribly. I thought we'd do okay since we were both seasoned gamers, and I had played the game before. It was fun to lose. This photo above was for a later game after we added the curses and the treasures. We won this one. 

Some of the curses I had

I showed Jetta Take Time. It's a little easier as a 2-player game. I enjoy it more with four because it's more challenging. Still we didn't always win, even at Level 1. I should play this like a campaign. Find three other people who will accompany me to do this whole thing over several sessions, all 40 challenges from Level 1 to 10. 

When we played Cat Between Us, we had a perfect tied game. For three consecutive rounds both of us had perfect scores (or purrfect scores), landing exactly where the cat was. So it was a perfect tie. Maybe this game is a bit easier to play with two players too. 

Popcorn

Popcorn is a game about running your own cineplex. You buy screening rights for movies, you attract cinema-goers and you upgrade your cinema halls to provide great movie experiences. You have to keep your list of movies fresh, taking down movies before customers completely dry up and showing new movies to attract customers. While scoring points (points are called popcorn here), you need to take care of your cashflow because you need money to buy new movies and upgrade your theatres. 

You have three halls at your cinema and they will show different movies. Cinema halls can fit between one to three customers. Some seats have special abilities. You enjoy these benefits only if the customer you arrange to sit there match the seat colour. Grey seats are wild, so as long as you have a customer, you get the benefit. In the third hall above, the seat is blue, so you need a blue customer there to be able to earn that extra money. 

Customers are handled using a deck-building mechanism. In Popcorn this is physically implemented as bag-building. Depending on your audience level, you draw a number of customers from the bag every round, and you try to seat them in your halls. Customers you manage to seat will give you benefits not only based on the seats, but also based on the options offered by the movie. When your bag runs out of customers, you return used customers to your bag and continue drawing. During the game you can take customers of specific colours from the common supply or from other players, and you can also remove your own customers from circulation, returning them to the common supply. Depending on the kind of movies you have and the types of seats you have, you will prefer customers of specific colours. In this game colours mean movie genres, like comedy, action, drama. 

Movies have a limited lifetime. There are four segments on the left side of a movie, showing four different benefits. The right customers can help you claim these. At the end of every round, the bottommost visible segment will be covered and becomes unavailable. When all four segments are covered, the movie expires and you can no longer show it. Of course you don't necessarily have to wait until then to replace it with a new movie. You can do so earlier. 

Your actions are pretty simple. You buy movies from a common pool. You buy halls. If you have invested in marketing in the previous round, you can attract specific customers to your pool of customers. After everyone has performed actions, you move on to screening movies and scoring points and other benefits from doing so. 

One of the ways to score points is through the objective cards (those on the right in the screenshot above). You start the game with one, and during the game you can draw more. Objective cards specify conditions you need to fulfil by game end in order to score points. They can be in the form of sets of customer + movie + seat of a specific colour. You keep all movies you have shown throughout the game. However when you replace a hall with a new one, you don't keep the old hall or the seats in it. Your pool of customers can change during the game. You can add or remove customers. Others may steal your customers too. 

Popcorn was much more fun than I expected. I had not heard of the game before, and I didn't really know what to expect. It didn't seem like much from playing the tutorial on BoardGameArena.com. However the movie theatre theme really does kick in and I found myself enjoying the game. The movie spoofs are funny. I have to be on my toes preparing to buy the next movie before a currently showing movie runs dry. Even Titanic will eventually run out of viewers. You have to watch your opponents. If you are going for the same colour as another player, it will likely be painful for both of you. You'll be fighting over the same customers, movies and halls (seats). I find some of the objectives rather hard to achieve, especially those that require that I have few white customers. I think I need to specialise in a certain genre from early on to be able to achieve such an objective. 

Some parts of the game are tactical. When an opportunity arises, you grab that movie or that hall. There are some quick wins you shouldn't miss. This is about analysing the current situation and recognising patterns. You should still have a longer-term strategy, specialising in some genres, and working towards some of your objectives. The four genres in the game have different characteristics. Action movies get you points quickly. Comedies let you increase your audience. Dramas help you with money and objective cards. Looking at it this way, this sounds like a deck-building game. 

At the end of the game, it is satisfying to review all those movies I have screened at my cineplex. I have Top Gun, Fast & Furious and The Godfather! And I think that's Pretty Woman. 

Popcorn is a light- to mid-weight strategy game. It will work as a family game. You get to enjoy the fun bits of running a cineplex without worrying about the downsides, like cleaning up all that popcorn on the floor at 2am. 

Miams

In Miams (I think it means yummy in French) you roll five dice and try to get combinations which will score you points. Normally you get one reroll, and you get to choose which dice to reroll. Throughout the game you gain abilities which let you manipulate the dice and do other things which help you score points. The game ends when anyone reaches 50 points. 

The die faces are different types of fruits, and one cross. That cross helps your opponents. You always have at least one reroll. Which dice to reroll depends on what you are aiming for. Sometimes you take risks. When you already have a pair, you may choose to reroll one of them to attempt to make five different fruits. You might fail and get nothing. Or you may choose to sacrifice a full house to attempt a four of a kind or five of a kind. When you reroll a fruit die, you are also taking the risk of rolling a cross which will help your opponents. 

On the player sheet you can see all the combinations you can attempt. Most of them are simply rolling multiple dice of the same fruit. Then there's a full house, and 5 different fruits. Whenever you manage to make a combo, you score the next available number in the row by drawing a heart around it. If an opponent rolls a cross, you get to cross off a number on your sheet. You don't score it, but crossing a number makes the next one available, so you will potentially score more points on your turn later. 

At some positions you earn stars. This is a currency for you to buy those power cards on the right. That column of power cards work like a sushi belt, always moving downwards. The bottom card is always free, so you can always take one card on your turn even if you have no star. These powers are important in helping you make good combos. They can also help you score points in other ways too. Some of these are ongoing abilities, like being able to treat one fruit as another type. Some are single use, for example scoring 3 points per orange rolled. 

Sometimes you get extra rerolls. Sometimes you get to roll an additional die. All these help towards making better combos. Sometimes combinations of powers can be particularly potent. 

The game is quick and easy. There is certainly some luck. However there are interesting decisions you need to make along the way. You want to make good use of the power cards. Stars are worth points when the game ends. Sometimes it's not easy to decide whether to spend them to help you cross the finish line faster, or to keep them for points. Which combo to go for is not always easy to decide. The game is a race to 50. It's exciting to watch what your opponents roll.