boardgaming in photos: Clans of Caledonia, Hanamikoji, Molly House, Caylus, Regicide

I took a screenshot of my list of games in progress at BoardGameArena.com. Just a snapshot of a moment in time. I spend much time in front of my computer, both for work and leisure, and I always have a browser tab with BGA open. Whenever it is my turn for one of the games I'm playing, a tiny triangle is animated at the tab. When I notice it I happily click to take my turn. 

I recently taught younger daughter Chen Rui to play Hanamikoji on BGA. This is such a lovely game. Only four simple actions per round, but boy they really make you pause and think! So much agony. We started with the standard game, but also tried some variants. The core rules are still the game, but the four action tiles are different. Hanamikoji has become a modern classic and I think that is well deserved. 

Caylus, arguably the first worker placement game. It was highly popular when it first came out. It popularised the worker placement mechanism in boardgames. I own a physical copy of this and so far it has survived every purge even though I have not played it for a long time. It is a milestone game in the modern boardgame history. 

The game takes quite long to play in asynchronous mode. I made several embarrassing blunders, e.g. claiming a spot to exchange money and cloth for a favour, and forgetting that I'm only getting that piece of cloth at a later building activation. It's fun to revisit an oldie. From 2005. 

I almost played Clans of Caledonia when I was back in my hometown, and now I have actually played it online with a different group of friends. This is another game with a long gap since I last played, so I had to relearn the whole thing. When I play such games, one thing I do is I reread my own blog post about them. It helps give me a brief summary and a strategic overview. At least I hope this helps avoid stupid mistakes from my previous plays. 

I took the MacKenzie clan, which specialises in brewing whiskey. I earned some extra money for brewing whiskey, and if I stored and aged them, I could make extra money too. 

There is contract fulfilment, and buying and selling goods affecting their prices. 

I played A Feast for Odin. I had many occupation cards but I didn't know how to utilise them well. They seemed to be useful only for very specific situations. I ended up not playing most of them, and for some I only played them for the four points. 

I played Molly House. This is quite a difficult game to learn to play because the rules are unusual. Although I have played it before, I still don't quite grasp the game. The first game we played ended abruptly with the following results. We didn't manage the gossip pile well, and there was a major crackdown. Everyone lost. 

When you chat on BGA, they are quite strict about the language you use and will warn you if you use potentially inappropriate language. So we couldn't joke about these results, which people familiar with contemporary Malaysian politics would probably make fun of. 

I thought I was getting pretty good at Regicide. I am currently not subscribed to a paid membership on BGA, but this is free to play, so sometimes I play it solo. I feel I know all the important tactics and I feel I apply them well. Sometimes I win comfortably and confidently. Yet sometimes I get into a losing streak. This is such a great game! Regicide Legacy will be reaching Malaysia soon, and I'm looking forward to that. 

A chat with Eric Lang

 

31 Jan 2026. Eric Lang (Blood Rage, Rising Sun, Ankh, Chaos in the Old World) was in town. He has been staying in Malaysia on and off for many years, and is now planning to spend more time living in Kuala Lumpur. He wants to get to know the local designer community and the local boardgame community. Aaron arranged two meet-up sessions for game designers and other industry players to get to know Eric. I almost couldn't make it due to prior appointments, but luckily one of them was rescheduled and I made it to the session at BGC Space. 

This was an inspiring and insightful session. Eric shared some of his experiences being in the industry for so many years, and also his perspectives on the boardgame scene in Malaysia, Singapore and Asia. He had decided he wanted to become a game designer from very early on, and had been highly committed to make this work. Here are some of my takeaways from the session: 

1. Be clear about what you want to be. What kind of role do you want to play in the boardgame industry? Do you want to be doing this as your life career? Choose one clear role you want to be good at. What kind of games do you want to make? How does a day in your life look like in 5 years? Envision what you want to be in 5 years, and don't let limiting thoughts stop you from moving towards it. 
2. If you want to pitch to a publisher, look at the games they have been publishing for the past 3 years and pitch the right games to them. Know their standards and meet them before you pitch. 
3. Always hold yourself to high standards and to international standards. Surround yourself with people with that level of standard. 
4. Game designers who are gamers often overestimate the appetite of the general public for complexity in games. Machi Koro is too complex. 
5. If you want to make a mass market game, the back of the box should have 3 bullet points that describe and sell the game, but not teach the game. 
6. Monopoly Deal is a great gateway game to convert non-gamers, more so than Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne. 
7. If you run a boardgame cafe or boardgame store targeting non-gamers, make sure you have chess, Scrabble and Monopoly in your shop window. 
8. For an industry to grow, say the Malaysian boardgame market, you need multiple people who are good at different specific things. E.g. game designers, game retailers, game distributors, game reviewers, event organisers, marketeers, content creators. These people need to be very good at what they do. Don't try to do everything, because you will likely burn out. What Eric has observed in Malaysia is we local publishers are generalists who do the whole spectrum of stuff, which might not be healthy. 

One thing we discussed was bringing people into the hobby. This is something Malaysia needs to do. Boardgames is still too niche a hobby, and the market is tiny. But that also means the potential for growth is big. 

Eric is enthusiastic and energetic, and keen to help the Malaysian boardgame scene. It is great to be able to learn from him. I look forward to more opportunities to meet and learn from him when he settles down in KL. 

Captain Tsubasa

Captain Tsubasa is a 2 player game based on the manga and anime of the same name. This Japanese manga and anime from the 1980’s is hugely popular not only in Japan but also around the world. It is about football (soccer). In the game you play a football match between two key teams in the story, Nankatsu and Toho. This is a card game, and you will see many characters from the series. If you are a fan, this will be fun. 

The game is divided into two halves, and you play 6 rounds in each half. You have your own deck of cards and you draw cards from it. At the start of a round, each player also drafts one card from a common pool. Every round one player is the attacker and the other the defender. You take turns playing cards until there are nine cards in total played, or both players pass. Cards have various effects, and one of them is giving you strength in attack, passing or defense. You may also get tokens for one of these three aspects. When the card play phase ends, the attacker must decide whether to attempt to score a goal or to retain ball possession. Attacker and defender compare their attack (or passing) and defense strengths respectively. They may add tokens to increase their strengths. They also roll dice to add to their strengths. If the attacker has a higher total, they score a goal or retain ball possession. Retaining possession means not scoring a goal, but remaining the attacker in the next round. If a goal is scored or an attempt fails, the other team becomes attacker next round. 

There is no board play or pawns on a football field. The characters in the story and their strengths are represented by cards. Goalkeeper cards make it possible to save a round you are about to lose. There are some special attack and special defense cards which let you play a form of rock paper scissors. 

There is an ebb and flow like a football match. You take turns attacking. You try to maximise your odds by utilising your cards well. There is some luck in the game, not just in terms of the die rolls, but also in terms of card draw. I think that’s a good thing because it’s exciting. Football is supposed to be like that. 

There is some deck building in the game. You only have a small deck. Whenever your deck runs out, you will shuffle your discard pile to form a new deck, and you continue to draw. During the game you can remove cards, and you can recruit new cards. This adds some longer term strategy. You can customise your football team.

The game is light. It’s fast and furious. There is some tactical play.  There is also a healthy dose of luck. If you like the original series, I think you will get a real kick out of this. Pun intended. 

Up or Down?

Up or Down? is a simple card game from from the master duo Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling which is not as simple as it looks. You collect up to three sets of cards, and within each set the cards must be played in ascending or descending order. Cards come in 6 different colours and every card has a different number. The cards in the game go from 1 to 126, but the range you use depends on the number of players. First let's talk about how the scoring works. 

For each of your sets, your score is the number of cards in the set multiplied by the number of cards of the colour you have the most of. So from the screenshot above, the three columns score like this: 8 x 3 (yellow) = 24, 2 x 1 (either colour) = 2, 8 x 5 (blue) = 40. On your turn you must take a card from the centre of the table, and add it to one of your sets. The cards in the sets must be played in ascending or descending order. In case you can't add your new card to any existing set, you must discard one of your sets to start a new set with your new card. Discarded cards go to your personal discard pile. They are still worth points, but at a measly 1 point each. 

Here is how a turn works. You always have a hand of three cards. On your turn you must play one card to the centre of the table. 

There are always six cards at the centre of the table, ordered in a circle in ascending order. When you play a card, it is added to this circle of cards, inserted at the appropriate spot. You must then take one of the two cards next to the card you just added. This is how you claim a card from the centre. At the end of your turn, you draw a new card from one of the two draw decks in the middle. One of them is face-up, and the other face-down. 

The game is played until the draw decks run out, and after everyone has played all their hand cards. Only then you check your scores to see who wins. 

So far all this sounds pretty straight-forward. Only upon playing I realised this game is a little trickier than I thought. Despite the simple rules, the correct tactics to employ are not easy to figure out. What's a good play and what's not? I must admit after two games I still have not fully figured out the game. My first thought was I should have one ascending set and one descending set, and the third can be either. However I soon realised this might not be necessary. 

Which card should you play? At first I only cared about it helping me to get a card that fit well with my current sets. Later I realised it's important to watch what cards your opponents are collecting and try to avoid putting out a card they want. The card you play will affect the circle of cards. It might become a card you can take on your next turn. It might interfere with your plans to take another card on your next turn. These are all things to think about. When you need to take a card from one of the draw decks, although there are only two options, it is not always easy to make a decision. My first thought was I should have a wide range of numbers in my hand, so that I always have more options. Later I felt that might not be right. Depending on the numbers I'm trying to collect, I might need to take cards close to those numbers. 

I think the most effective way to score well is to take many cards of the same colour for the same set. What this means is you'll need to watch what other players are collecting. If they are going for the same colour, you will have competition. You also want to deliberately take colours which others want for the sake of denying them. I realise it is important to watch what numbers and colours are useful to your opponents. 

One strategy I thought about was focusing on making only two high-scoring sets, leaving the third as a burn set. You try to keep those two sets as pure as possible, while the third set is for you to dump cards which don't fit. Expect the third set to be discarded often and to not score much. I tried this and it somewhat works, but I'm not sure whether this is the best strategy. Maybe there are others. 

The end game can be challenging. You will have to play all your hand cards eventually. Ideally you want to avoid discarding any of your sets, because cards being discarded will score fewer points. If you are not careful with the end game, you might be forced to discard a set, and you may end the game with fewer points than you have during the game. 

Up or Down? reminds me a little of Take 5 / 6 Nimmt, the classic by Wolfgang Kramer. I am intrigued by how it works and I am curious to figure it out. I think ultimately you can't have tight control over how well you do. Luck is a factor. Yet there are tactics you can employ. An experienced player will most likely beat a new player. I like Up or Down? because it gives me a good mental workout, and it brings something new to the table. I am liking smaller games like this compared to those run-of-the-mill heavy Eurogames with tons of resource collection, resource conversion and contract fulfilment. 

BGG file uploaders

A blog post on BoardGameGeek.com listed the games with the most files uploaded, and also users who have uploaded the most files. I know I have uploaded many concise reference sheets but I did not realise I am among the top 20 people who have uploaded files to BGG. I'm ranked #17. I just need two more files to go up to #16 ha ha. It feels good to contribute in some small way to this community of ours.  

Terra Nova

I am almost tempted to just write that Terra Nova is a simplified version of Terra Mystica. End of story. It's technically true, but that's a bit lazy. I have played Terra Mystica before. It's a hugely popular game. I can't say I'm a fan, but I do enjoy myself when I play it. 

Just like the predecessor, you play a tribe starting with small settlements, and you grow your settlements and your tribe, constructing more buildings and upgrading them. You can only build on one specific terrain type, and often you need to terraform terrain so that you can use it. There is magic power in the game. It works like charging battery. You need to charge up the magic stones before you can use them. After they are depleted, you need to charge them again to be able to use their power. 

If you have played Terra Mystica, all this is familiar. Now I must admit I haven't played Terra Mystica that many times. When I played Terra Nova, I thought, wait, isn't this the same thing? It has all the key elements that I remember of the original. The only thing I was sure was missing was the four temples. You don't need to advance your markers on the four temples to compete for majority anymore. Only when I checked in more detail I realised a few other simplifications. You have fewer types of buildings now, and you don't have workers as a resource any more. In Terra Mystica you spend workers to terraform. Now you just spend money. 

In Terra Nova you will compete for space. You want to expand your settlements. There is this interesting rule where you get a discount when upgrading your building if it is adjacent to an opponent's building. So you have incentive to build near your opponents, even if it means more competition. 

The more buildings you have, the more income you will also generate every round. The largest buildings (palaces) give you special abilities, and these are different depending on the faction you play. Every end of round there is a special scoring opportunity. You want to plan your expansion based on these, to maximise your points. For example one may give you points for palaces. You will want to build palaces in time for that. 

If you like Terra Mystica, I don't see much reason for you to want to play Terra Nova, unless you specifically want a similar experience but shorter and simpler. I think fans of Terra Mystica love it partly because of the complexity. They don't need the game to be streamlined. In fact Terra Nova may feel diluted and less interesting to them. I think Terra Nova is meant for a different audience. I like Terra Nova more than Terra Mystica, in the same way that I like Great Western Trail: El Paso more than Great Western Trail. I think the simpler versions deliver the most fun parts of the game while reducing work you need to do. They are the executive summaries of the originals. Maybe they are not the "full experiences", but they are more succinct. 

Leaders

Leaders is a 2 player abstract game played on a hexagonal board made of hexagonal spaces. You each start the game with just one game piece - your leader. In the first few rounds of the game you will get to recruit minions from a market of three options. Every minion in the game has a unique ability. You will eventually have four minions, after which you do not recruit any more. Your goal is to capture the opponent leader. You do this by having two of your pieces next to it, or you force it to be fully surrounded by pieces, regardless of whether your own or your opponent’s. 

Leaders wear crowns

On your turn you get to move all your pieces once. Your minions have all sorts of powers. Some can move more than just one step. Some move like rooks, moving in a straight line. Some jump over others. Some pieces can move other pieces, for example pulling or pushing them. Some pieces protect others from being manipulated. 

This is a perfect information game. You know exactly what powers your opponent has. You need to move and position your pieces to capture the opponent leader which protecting your own. In many ways this is like chess. 

Checkmate! White leader captured by black minions.

One part that’s different is you don’t capture or eliminate opponent pieces. You can’t land on other pieces. Blocking can be a very effective tactic. Some powers require line of sight. Sometimes you will find that you are blocking your own pieces. Positioning them and moving them can be frustratingly slow if you don’t plan well. 

Both the games I played were short. Han and I were new to the game, and we were not good at defense. Your game pieces have a good variety of powers (and you get to choose your combination of powers) and since you get to move all pieces on your turn as opposed to just one piece per turn, you can orchestrate powerful moves. 

Intercontinental Snow White (play by forum)

Recently Hilko informed me about a game of Snow White and the Eleven Dwarfs being played in a BoardGameGeek.com forum. It is hosted by Dave Peters, and the players are from different countries, including from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and even Australia. I certainly have never imagined my game being played in this format, so I am watching this game with curiosity (link to thread, item 3). One name in the player list that struck me was Jeroen Doumen - one of the designers at Splotter Games. I have been a big fan of their games for many years. It is surreal to see one of my most admired game designers play my game. 

boardgaming in photos: Brazil Imperial, Take Time, Cili Padi Games, mahjong rummy

I was back in my hometown Kota Kinabalu during the Christmas period, and met up with an old friend to play some boardgames. We did a four-player game of Brazil Imperial. I have played this once before, but quite some time ago. This is a very pretty game. 

These were the three objectives I chose. Originally the plan was to play Clans of Caledonia. Then the plan changed because it was a Monday night and we wanted to do a shorter game. We had work the next day. I had never imagined Brazil Imperial to be considered a shorter game than Clans of Caledonia. I have played both, but I remembered neither clearly. I thought Brazil Imperial was pretty complex. It is a 4X game. 

Brazil Imperial was thought to be quick because it was a rush game. You need to race to complete your objectives, because if others beat you to it, you will miss your scoring opportunities. Indeed there is time pressure. I thought I did rather poorly in this game. I didn't quite remember the game and I had to learn it all over again. In the early game I chose to enhance some actions, but I later realised I didn't utilise them as much as I felt I should. That was a little wasteful. To my surprise, I ended the game in second place. A distant second, and I was only 1 point ahead of 3rd place. Still, that was better than I had expected. I was pretty peaceful and didn't do much warring. There was some fighting in our game, between Nicholas and Chua, but there isn't much time to fight in this game. Still, the outcome of battles can have a huge impact. So you do have to watch out for war, or you want to make use of it. 

I played the game in a pretty Euro way - choosing one or two aspects to focus on and maximising my points related to those aspects. Having played the game twice, my impression is about the same as last time. It's okay. It's a civilisation game. 

My sister and her family were back in KK too, and my nephew and niece loved playing mahjong rummy when they were there. This is our standard Chinese New Year game, but I guess now it's a Christmas game too. 

I saw this at a supermarket when in KK and bought one. This is the name of my little indie game publishing studio - Cili Padi Games. Coke has been making cans like this for some time in Malaysia. Coke cans have common Malaysian nicknames. Cili padi is Malay and it is a type of small chilli. People who are small in size but feisty are sometimes given such a nickname. This is also why I use it as my brand. I want to make games which are small but pack a punch. 

I played a lot of Take Time with my nephew, niece and brother-in-law. We really enjoyed this. We have only worked through to Level 3 so far. Now that I have played more of this, I develop some general strategies and best practices. Now that can be a bad thing. If these are so effective that the game becomes too easy, the game will feel solved, and it will feel pointless to keep playing. The tweaks and limitations introduced by the different levels address this problem. Also your card draws are random. The card draws can create very different challenges from game to game, even for the same level and part. 

Sometimes when we finally won a level after many failed attempts, we all stood up and cheered and gave high fives. 

What a beautiful game!

3 Jan 2026 was the first playtesting session for the year. TTGDMY (Tabletop Game Designers of Malaysia) did not organise as many playtesting sessions in 2025 compared to the year before. This first session in 2026 went well and we had good attendance. I playtested Apa You Cakap, Pilgrim Poker (aka Bet West, Saikoyu) and Math Dice. I brought Rebels of the Three Kingdoms too but did not have enough time to play it. Many other games were playtested. The session went about 6 hours! 

Draft & Write Records

Draft & Write Records is a paper and pencil game. Your put together a rock band, bringing together not only the musicians, but also producers and stage hands. You release albums and singles, you do shows starting with local pubs and hopefully eventually progressing to prestigious stadiums. Every player does this on his own player sheet. You check boxes off to mark your progress in the various aspects of running a rock band. You score points for the progress you make. To determine which boxes you can check, there is a card drafting mechanism.

The card crafting mechanism is similar to that in 7 Wonders. You get a hand of cards. You pick one and pass the rest to your neighbour. The card you choose determines which part of your sheet you get to check off. This process is repeated several times, until one last card remains and is then discarded. Then you start a new round with new cards drawn from the deck. 

Checking boxes off a sheet of paper is actually rather abstract. Some parts of the game are mechanisms unrelated to the theme. However, there are also aspects which make you feel like you are really putting together a band and managing their career, which is fun. The people you recruit each have four icons. These are used to represent whether people you bring to the team click with one another. Some spaces need to be unlocked before you can check them off, and to unlock them, you need money. That's pretty realistic. This is business. You need to worry about funding. You also want to release a good mix of albums and singles. You score points by multiplying these two. That kind of makes sense, doesn't it?

Let's look at some aspects of the player sheet: 

Those Polaroid photo slots in the middle are the spaces for your band members. Some icon spaces are linked. You want these linked spaces to have the same icons. You get a bonus for that. At the top right you have a grid of icons. You want to complete rows and columns (including diagonally) to score points or to get to check off other spaces. On the right side when you check off the bigger icons, you get to claim the bonuses between them. 

There are four public goals. They are evaluated at the end of every round, and multiple players can achieve the same goal. Goals are discarded at the end of a round if scored, and new ones will be drawn. One way the game ends is when any player completes 6 goals. When you complete a goal, you not only score points, you also gain some bonuses allowing you to check off specific spaces. Like many pencil and paper games, you can trigger nice chain reactions. 

Whenever you get to perform, you advance on these paths. There are forks, so you have to choose which paths to go down. The money icons mean you need to unlock those sections before you can pass through. 

I must say this is a lot of fun. I am not specifically a fan of pencil and paper games but I don't dislike them either. This one works for me partly because of the theme. I had a rock star dream once, many moons ago. The card drafting works well. It can be tough to choose between the incredible vocalist and the god-tier lead guitarist. Sometimes a plain producer by himself may not score many points, but if he clicks well with others on the team, together they can do amazing things. Should I pass on this good singer and hope to get an even better one who also works with the rest of the band? I only have one singer slot after all. Card drafting means sometimes you hate draft to deny your opponents what they want. There is a penalty mechanism in the game. If you are forced to take a person but you have no more slot, you will suffer a penalty. These penalties get more are more costly as you accumulate them. This is something to watch out for. There is no direct player interaction, but the hate drafting can sometimes be devastating due to the penalty mechanism. Most of the time this game is quite pleasant because you generally focus on building your own dream band. 

So yes, being band manager can be as much fun as being lead singer. 

I was aiming to perform at the Sydney Opera House (bottom left).

I almost completed the top right section!